
Book^_B-iL 
Copyright }j° 



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GERMANY MISJUDGED 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 



AN APPEAL TO INTERNATIONAL GOOD 

WILL IN THE INTEREST OF A 

LASTING PEACE 



BY 

ROLAND HUGINS 



CHICAGO LONDON 

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 
1916 






Copyright by 

THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 

1916 



Printed in the United States of America 



APR 10 1916 

^Cl,A428466 

^H^ t. 



TO THOSE AMERICANS AND ENGLISHMEN 
WHO HAVE HEEDED KIPLING WHERE 
KIPLING HAS NOT HEEDED HIMSELF: 
"IF YOU CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD WHEN ALL ABOUT YOU 
ARE LOSING THEIRS AND BLAMING IT ON YOU—" 

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED. 



FOREWORD 

THERE are persons who look upon the term 
"pro-German" as an epithet of reproach. Though 
not one of these, I insist that the term does not 
accurately characterize this book. The book is pro- 
American. It is written from the American point of 
view, and with American interests in mind. Person- 
ally I am not much worried for the Germans, because, 
for one thing, I am convinced that they are entirely 
able to take care of themselves. But I am much con- 
cerned for the future of America. 

I have tried to analyze the international situation 
from the facts as I see them, I have written with 
both a fear and a hope : a fear that the United States, 
the one great nation that so far has stood aloof, might 
lose its head and join the carnage; a hope that Amer- 
ica, at some future time, might contribute effectively 
to the upbuilding of a permanent peace for the world. 
To my mind the United States can make no bigger 
blunder, no graver historical mistake, than to abandon 
its position of neutrality. I contend that it has no 
business in this war, no matter whether the Teutonic 
Powers win or lose. The plunge into war is like a 
jump into a whirlpool ; it is easy enough to get in, but 
there is no calm second thought, and escape can be 

7 



< 



FOREWORD 

purchased only by a terrific drain on vitality. Amer- 
ica sober, would not make war; but America drunk 
with anti-German prejudice, might take the plunge. 
To add, in some small way, to that sobriety of judg- 
ment that would make us pause before we leap, is one 
of the chief purposes of the book. 

That America will be able to do anything construc- 
tive for world peace seems to me questionable. For 
at present the vision of America is clouded. It is not 
anti-war, except in a vague, sentimental way; it is 
anti-German. It identifies "militarism" with a single 
nation. It does not see that militarism in Germany 
(and I do not deny its existence there) can never be 
wiped out by the pressure of rival militarisms. Guilt, 
apparently, is never satisfactory until it is personal. 
Americans in general have felt revulsion and horror 
at this war, and they have shown a disposition to fix 
the guilt on somebody, some definite set of human 
beings, — not a system — not an historical process — ^but 
a visible and punishable criminal. And they have made 
the German people, or the German Junkers, the crim- 
inal. But this is not thinking, it is malice. G. Lowes 
Dickinson has observed: "I believe that this war 
... is a calamity to civilization unequaled, unexam- 
pled, perhaps irremediable; and that the only good 
that can come out of it would be a clearer compre- 
hension by ordinary men and women of how wars 
are brought about, and a determination on their part 
to put a stop to them." America will never contribute 
effectively to the cause of world peace until it sets 

8 



FOREWORD 

about to examine critically the underlying causes of 
modern war. Such an examination can be made only 
when the purposes and needs of each nation, including 
Germany, are approached in a friendly spirit. 

I belong, I think, to that class of Americans whose 
voice so far has been little heard. For I am one of 
those whose sympathy with Germany rests on rational 
rather than on emotional grounds. This is a pre- 
sumptuous claim, perhaps, but one I can, make fairly. 
I have no German blood — and incidentally, no Irish, 
I have never been in Germany, and I have no ties 
with the Fatherland. I am an American who has been 
here, so to speak, for a long time, — since about 1690. 
As I view them, these considerations are not impor- 
tant. We are all Americans together, each equally 
entitled to his opinion. But there are so many haughty 
patriots haranguing the country who seek to monop- 
olize "truly American" spokesmanship, that I must 
declare my right to speak as an American, unhyphen- 
ated. 

The four main chapters of the book are reprinted 
from The Open Court for November and December, 
1915, and for January and April, 1916. The intro- 
ductory chapter, "The Myth of a Demon Enemy," is 
reprinted from the New York Times of July 11, 1915, 
and is reproduced here because it expresses in suc- 
cinct form the spirit in which the whole is conceived. 
Three of the chief chapters are put in the form of 
open letters to Germany, England and France, the 
three great nations involved that may be said to be 



FOREWORD 

representative of Western civilization. The final chap- 
ter treats directly of America. In reality, however, 
the entire book is written to and for Americans, — and 
quite as much for those whose sympathies are pro- 
Ally as those whose sympathies are with the Central 
Powers. Some portions of the discussion deal with 
aspects of opinion and governmental action pertinent 
at the time of writing, but the bulk of it treats of the 
more fundamental reactions of America to the world 
war. 

I have tried not to be betrayed by heat of contro- 
versy into censorious language. I take it this is not 
a time for Americans to indulge in venomous accusa- 
tions, however bad tempers may be in Europe. For 
after all, half the world is bleeding to death and the 
heart of humanity is breaking. When one stops to 
think of this war, not in abstractions, but in particu- 
lars — what it means in individual human values, he 
puts aside rancor, even though (as he thinks) he com- 
bats untruth. R. H. 

Ithaca, N. Y. 

February 1, 1916. 



10 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

The Myth of a Demon Enemy 13 

An Explanation to Germany 18 

A Question for England 43 

France ! 66 

The Attitude of America 80 

Index 112 



11 



THE MYTH OF A DEMON ENEMY 

ONE of the peculiarly depressing aspects of modern 
war is the degradation of the non-combatant 
mind. The civilian population goes blind with intol- 
erance and mad with hate. In war w^e credit any 
impossible virtue in ourselves and any degree of wick- 
edness in our foe. We swallow with eager gullibility 
every tale, plausible or grotesque, of his cruelty, his 
bestiality, his mendacity, his stupidity. The enemy 
becomes the scapegoat of the universe, and we load 
him with every conceivable attribute ofl evil until he 
looms in our eyes a monster of inhuman fiendishness. 
We picture him as the potential destroyer of every- 
thing worthy — of liberty, of art, of democracy, even 
of civilization itself. We do our narrow-minded best 
to belittle his achievements in science, literature and 
government. We are the good white knight, but he 
is the seven-headed dragon that God and justice has 
called us to destroy. 

"War," said an ancient philosopher, "makes men 
mild." But this is true only of those who do the 
actual fighting. In the trenches, we know, the German 
is respected, and even regarded with a half-bantering 
affection. The soldier speaks generously of his foe, 
whose bravery and suffering he sees and appreciates. 

13 



^ 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

The soldier, moreover, understands the nature of war- 
fare, and does not cite the harshness of military opera- 
tions — which he himself, in whatever army, must 
practice of necessity — as a proof of the enemy's per- 
sonal depravity. The civilian does precisely that. Out 
of hearing of the guns the humility and reasonableness 
which this game of life and death imposes have no 
counterpart. The millions of non-combatants, pricked 
daily by poisoned pens, join in an orgy of vilification, 
brandish lies about the enemy, chant their hymns of 
hate, and curse when they pretend to pray. It is even 
probable that a non-militarist democracy runs into this 
moral vitiation more easily than a military autocracy. 
For where great armies must be raised by volunteer- 
ing, abuse of the adversary is elevated to a public duty. 
The spirit of the people must be aroused, it is said; 
we must be worked up and kept up to the fighting 
pitch, or rather to the recruiting pitch, by fair means 
or foul. The press takes on an inflammatory and 
scurrilous tone. A premium is put upon Billingsgate. 
To speak a fair and kindly word for the enemy is 
considered traitorous, and to degrade the nation into 
a mob is looked upon as a patriotic service. 

Of course the better men and women of every 
nation will resist this popular delirium. It is one of 
the proofs of England's greatness that there has been 
a constant stream of protests inl her papers and jour- 
nals against the slander-mongers. The cheap jour- 
nalist and the penny-a-liner mixes his ink with gall, 
but the cultivated Englishman speaks with moderation. 

14 



THE MYTH OF A DEMON ENEMY 

It ought to be possible for a democracy to make war 
with dignity. Battles cannot be won by insults, and 
mud is not even an effective weapon of defense; but 
it is easy to befoul our own hands and minds. A high 
moral tone is a nation's first duty to itself, and it can 
be won only by a vigilant self-control. Neither a just 
cause nor victory will in itself prevent a spiritual rout. 

There are certain obvious and human facts about 
Germany that we should keep in mind, both now and 
hereafter. Germany is not a Force, a Power, a His- 
torical Tendency, or a Beast, but only a number of 
Germans, speaking a different language, but funda- 
mentally like any other collection of men, women and 
children. They are now, and have been in the past, 
a great people, who command our respect in peace for 
their industrial and intellectual exertions, and in war 
for their valor and their power. Furthermore, they 
are convinced, like each of the other nations at war, 
that they are right in this conflict. In that cause they 
pour out their blood like water ; and they are suffering 
as few peoples have suffered. Germany, within her 
rims of flame, i is a nation in bandages and black; by 
day her land rings with the clangor of arms and shouts 
of defiance, but at night God hears there but one 
sound, the sobbing of women. Agony and death mean 
the same thing to a Teuton as to any other mortal, 
and heartbreak is just as hard to bear. 

Deeper and more lasting than any struggles of race, 
or pride, or national advantage are the human verities. 
Unless we hold to these we shall lose our soul, though 

15 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

we win a world. The true note of sane sympathy 
and understanding has been struck by an English 
writer not widely known in this country, A. Clutton- 
Brock, who contributes to the literary supplement of 
the London Times. Permit me to quote one or two 
of his admirable paragraphs : 

"We know that we are not what the Germans think 
us, whatever our sins may be. We know that Eng- 
land is not an abstraction, cold and greedy and treach- 
erous, but a country of people whose virtues we love 
and whose vices we extenuate because they are our 
own. But Germany — she seems to us now to speak 
with one voice as if she were an abstraction, and that 
voice says always the same venomous things against 
the abstract England of her evil dream. But she is 
not an abstraction any more than England is. She, 
too, is a country of men and women who love their 
own virtues and extenuate their own faults; and they 
also hear of the evil things which England says of 
them, and think that England is pouring out a hatred 
long nursed and attempting a destruction long planned. 
What an ugly word 'Germany' sounds to us now; yet 
to them it is a music which sets them marching, and 
they will suffer and die for it, as we for England. 
Every man has dignity who is ready to die for a cause, 
whether it be good or bad, for men will not die for 
causes that do not seem right to them; and the Ger- 
mans, we know, are ready to die in herds and droves, 
as we put it, for Germany. And yet each German to 
himself remains a single human being, with his indi- 

16 



THE MYTH OF A DEMON ENEMY 

vidual hopes and fears, with a wife and children pray- 
ing for him at home, with an immortal soul that im- 
poses this hard discipline upon his flesh. 

"These hosts are not inhuman, whatever evil de- 
sign has ranged them against us, but men like ourselves 
to whom we also seem inhuman hosts; and if some 
voice from heaven could suddenly speak the truth to 
us the weapons would drop from our hands and we 
would laugh in each other's faces until we wept to 
think of all the dead that could not share the truth 
with us, and the wounded who could not be cured 
by it, and the widows and orphans to whom it could 
not give back their husbands and fathers. For the 
truth, the ultimate truth, behind all arguments and 
national conflicts and all the pride of victory and the 
shame of defeat, is that we are men in whom the spirit 
is stronger than the flesh, in whom the spirit desires 
love more than the flesh desires hatred. We have a 
strange way of showing that now ; but whatever our 
own delusions, each nation knows that it is fighting 
the delusions of the other ; and against them it is neces- 
sary for us to fight as against the hallucinated fury of 
a madman. Yet the fighting is best done as good 
soldiers do it who know that their enemies are men, 
not devils, and who fear them the less because they 
do not hate." 



17 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

THE United States, my German friends, has main- 
tained relations of amity and good- will with your 
country for a century and more ; and it is to be hoped 
that this historic friendship will continue undiminished 
through the world war. At the very outbreak of hos- 
tilities, however, menacing undercurrents of unpleas- 
antness were set in motion, and they have grown stead- 
ily in volume and strength. As soon as you became defi- 
nitely aware that sentiment here was running against 
you, you were amazed ; and that amazement gave way 
after a time to irritation. You could not understand, 
you said, how this republic should have been misled by 
British sophistry. Later you learned that our bankers 
were loaning millions to your enemies, and that our 
manufacturers were doing a stupendous business in 
supplying the Allies with explosives and other muni- 
tions of war. Then your irritation changed to bitter- 
ness and your papers, with Teutonic candor, did not 
attempt to conceal their resentment towards Germany's 
"invisible enemy." 

There has been a similar growth of antagonistic feel- 
ing in America. The bulk of our press took an un- 
friendly attitude toward you as early as August 1, 
1914. Your invasion of Belgium and the subsequent 

18 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

military measures which you employed there greatly 
intensified the hostility of some sections of American 
opinion. The current ran against you from that time 
on. There were intervals, it is true, when your cause 
here appeared to be gaining ground, particularly during 
the brilliant championship of Dr. Dernburg. But the 
sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine caused 
anti-German feeling to flame out afresh. The official 
relations of the two nations are now strained; and 
they may be worse before they are better. 

To say that this situation is distressing to many of 
us in America is to put the matter mildly. The mutual 
misunderstandings will not easily be cleared away. 
May I attempt to explain to you why Americans — the 
majority, that is — have sided against you? It will be 
hard for you to understand the true reasons. The 
obvious and usual explanations do not suffice. It was 
not because your cable was cut, for news from Berlin 
and Vienna reaches us regularly by wireless. It is not 
because the German point of view is unknown. We 
have had nO| censorship in this country, and you no 
lack of able defenders. Since the beginning of the 
war German-Amricans have protested vehemently 
against the prevailing antagonism, and our magazines 
and newspapers have published many telling argu- 
ments from pro-German pens. It is not because Amer- 
icans dislike Germany and things German. Before 
the war there may have been prejudice in some quar- 
ters against Germany; but there was also prejudice 
against England and against Russia. If German 

19 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

achievements in art, science and government are now 
belittled, it is because a recent partisanship has chilled 
the admiration rightly due you as a great people. 

No, the blindness and intolerance now so conspicu- 
ous are not the causes of our bias, but rather its symp- 
toms. You will entirely fail to understand the attitude 
of the typical American of intelligence unless you see 
that he thinks himself fair and just. He admits to 
no prejudice; he scoffs at the idea that he is the 
victim of English lies or sophistry ; he believes he has 
arrived at a reasoned judgment after an impartial ex- 
amination of the evidence. I think the American 
errs, but I know that he errs in good faith. He has 
rendered a decision against you because in his mind 
certain large charges have been proved against you. 
These charges may be grouped under the four follow- 
ing heads : 

First, that you, the people of Germany, or your 
military caste, started this war, and made Europe a 
shambles in an attempt to dominate world politics. 

Second, that your invasion and devastation of 
Belgium was a legal and moral crime which nothing 
can excuse or to appreciable degree palliate. 

Third, that you make war with ruthlessness and 
brutality, and disregard in the pursuit of your military 
ends the rules of international law and the dictates 
of, humanity. 

Fourth, thati your victory would be detrimental to 
civilization, leading to a militaristic domination which 
would ultimately threaten the peace of all democratic 
countries, including the United States. 

20 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

These accusations undoubtedly seem to you exag- 
gerated, absurd, grossly unjust. So they are, consid- 
ered from any viewpoint which includes knowledge 
of and sympathy for the German people. But let me 
assure you that they are held in all seriousness by 
thousands and thousands of Americans who are quite 
above the charge of either stupidity or hypocrisy. 
Their attitude results from a peculiar logic and their 
previous point of view. 

II 

Americans, you should understand, were surprised 
at this war. Yourselves, like Russians, Frenchmen, 
Englishmen, who have been living for two decades 
under the shadow of a possible European conflict, saw 
in the outbreak of hostilities the clash of deep his- 
torical forces. But Americans were literally bowled 
over with astonishment. They had been listening to 
the soothing assurances of pacifists, and the insincere 
professions of statesmen, until they were hypnotized 
into believing that a world war was "impossible." And 
when the war did come they hit upon the most obvious 
explanation : that some nation had conspired in its own 
interest to upset the sacred status quo. America im- 
mediately set herself up as judge to determine who 
was "guilty," and straightway fixed the blame on you. 
Germany was selected as the culprit because the 
surface case was against you. You had backed up 
Austria-Hungary in an attack on the small nation 
Servia. You had sent out twenty-four-hour ultima- 

21 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

turns and made the formal declarations of war on both 
Russia and France. You had drawn in England by 
violating the neutrality of a little country England 
had pledged to support. And so the surface case was 
complete; and this is precisely the case which your 
enemies rigged up against you in their White, Orange, 
Yellow, Gray and Blue Books. America accepted the 
indictment at almost face value. 

Does it seem preposterous that so simple, so naive a 
view of European politics could seriously be enter- 
tained? Does it appear ridiculous to you that the 
significance of events should be judged by their se- 
quence in time rather than by their causal connections, 
or that the incidents of a brief crisis should be given 
more weight than all the antecedent issues out of 
which the crisis arose? Well, such is the mind of 
average America. You must remember that we stand 
outside of the whirl of world politics, and are not 
accustomed to penetrate the shams of cabinets and the 
intrigues .of diplomats. In particular the editors who 
control our newspapers and magazines, and v/ho to 
some extent do "mold" public opinion, are usually 
without a sound European perspective, and often dis- 
play, in their quick but cocksure judgments of affairs 
outside our borders, a schoolboy naivete and a pro- 
vincial gullibility. They think of states as persons, 
who act on single and sentimental motives. 

But that is not all. America is not entirely made up 
of half-educated journalists and people who follow 
their opinions. Men of culture and travel, who take 

22 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

a more sophisticated view of international affairs, have 
joined in your condemnation. They, too, hold you 
"guilty." And this, I think, traces to one cause: a 
failure to understand the true nature and policy of 
Russia. The "bear that walks like a man" has been 
quite shouldered out of sight by England. You as 
Germans realize that the controversy which led directly 
up to the war was a Russo-German quarrel.^ You 
comprehend the politics of the Balkans, where bribery, 
assassination, and savage "exterminations" serve in 
lieu of diplomacy. You know that it was Russia's 
unyielding mobilization on two frontiers which pre- 
cipitated the present struggle. But Americans do not 
sense these things. From the beginning of the war 
Russia has been systematically and shamelessly white- 
washed. We are being fed with talk about Russia's 
liberalization at the very time when the Russian gov- 
ernment is throwing labor leaders into prison, exiling 
her Liberals to Siberia, instituting new pogroms against 
the Jews, and proceeding with a relentless Russifica- 
tion of Finland. We are constantly invited to admire 
"the soul of the Slav" as exemplified in Tolstoy, 
Dostoyevsky and Turgenieff, as though the intellectuals 
of Russia were not a small class among one hundred 
and seventy millions which suffers a living martyrdom 
in revolt against the dominant and inhuman autocracy. 
What G. Lowes Dickinson recently said to English- 
men might be addressed with even more force to 
Americans : "Since there has been in Russia a class 

^Brailsford, H. N., The Origins of the Great War. 

23 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

of thinkers and of writers that class has given all its 
energy to destroy the power and discredit the ideas 
of the Russian government. Persecuted with a horror 
of persecution of which Englishmen can form but the 
palest image (for such experiences lie outside our 
ken), exiled, imprisoned, tortured, by hundreds and 
by thousands, they have never ceased to protest, in 
season and out of season, against the whole conception 
of the state which animates the soulless bureaucracy 
of Russia." 

And so the American, forgetting Russia, and with 
his eyes on Germany, France, Belgium and England, 
declares you the aggressor. May I presume to give 
you my personal view of the burden of responsibility? 
In one sense, the ultimate sense, I cannot exempt you 
from all blame. Your government has, like all the 
governments of Europe, been concerning itself with 
the balance of power, and with imperialistic projects. 
It has demanded a voice in world affairs, its place in 
the sun. The creation of a great army, and especially 
the building of a big navy, were not wholly uncon- 
nected with these ambitions. In this you were merely 
part of the European system, for the world today is 
a militarist world. You were no deeper in it than 
England, which spent far more money on its military 
and naval equipment, nor France, which had a greater 
proportion of its population under arms. If you were 
better prepared it was only on account of certain quali- 
ties in your character, of thoroughness, of punctuality, 
of scientific versatility, of genius for organization, 

24 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

which are just as conspicuous in the arts of peace as 
of war. Each of the chancellories of Europe plotted 
for selfish national advantages— advantages, which had 
very little real significance for the masses in any coun- 
try—and bent its chief efforts to forming alliances 
which would shift the balance of power in its favor. 
To that system of rival alliances must be ascribed this 
collapse of civilization ; for fundamentally the conflict 
on its negative side is a war of mutual fears, and on 
its 'positive side a war of imperial ambitions. Thereby 
the system stands forever condemned, as must any 
system whch causes the slaughter of hundreds of thou- 
sands, and brings heartbreak to a million homes. The 
war itself is the great tragedy. The wreck of any na- 
tional ambitions is a paltry calamity by the side of it, 
and the fulfillment of no national hopes can compen- 
sate for it. 

But once granting the fundamental truth that the 
world of today is a militaristic world, the part you 
Germans have played in it has been a notably inof- 
fensive and honorable one. You have kept the peace 
for forty years, while every other great nation went 
to war. You have seen England and France each add, 
by military aggression or threat of it, four million 
square miles of colonial territory to their possessions, 
while you added one million,— mostly worthless land. 
You saw your legitimate projects for expansion balked 
again and again by English and French diplomacy, in 
Africa, in Asia, in the Balkans. You watched the 
growing menace of Russia, as, financed by French and 

25 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

British gold, she increased her military resources, built 
strategic railroads, and marshalled her half -barbarous 
millions. And when Russia threw down the challenge 
you accepted it. You were fighting for yourselves a 
preventative war, and for your ally Austria-Hungary 
a defensive war. 

Your statesmen were entirely honest when they said 
in the German White Paper : 

"Had the Servians been allowed, with the help of 
Russia and France, to endanger the integrity of the 
neighboring monarchy much longer, the consequence 
must have been the gradual disruption of Austria, and 
the subjection of the whole Slav world to the Russian 
scepter, with the result that the position of the German 
race in central Europe would have become untenable." 

You knew that the Pan-Slav movement, engineered 
from St. Petersburg, menaced Austria directly and 
yourself indirectly. What nonsense then to say that 
Russia entered the war out of sympathy for her little 
Slav brothers, the Serbs ! Russia had recently watched 
the humiliation of her little Slav brothers, the Bulgars, 
with composure, and even with satisfaction. For Bul- 
garia had broken loose from Russian influence, but the 
Servians were Russian tools. Further — and here is a 
point ignored in most of the "histories" written by 
Englishmen and Americans — Austria under pressure 
from your government modified her demands on Servia 
before she mobilized on August 1. She conceded the 
only point on which Russia, even from an imperialistic 
standpoint, could be interested, the territorial integrity 

26 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

and sovereignty of Servia. But Russia, certain of the 
co-operation of France, and confident of the support 
of Great Britain, moved from first to last for war. 
She was the first of the powers to mobihze. She per- 
sisted in that mobilization despite your warning that 
it could be interpreted in only one way. It was then 
that you saw parley was futile; you sent your ulti- 
matums, and mobilized to meet the double menace. 

There are Americans who, by some freak of rea- 
soning, declare that France was "attacked" by you — 
France, who had lent herself body and soul to the 
designs of the Russian autocracy! France, whose an- 
swer to your inquiry about her position was to call 
up her reserves ! No nation, however confident of its 
strength, would prefer to fight Russia and France 
together rather than Russia alone. You know who 
made the "attack." 

Ill 

The invasion of Belgium is considered in this coun- 
try the strongest count in the indictment against you; 
nothing carries such conviction of German perfidy to 
the mind of the American as your treatment of a 
pledge to respect her neutrality as a "scrap of paper ;" 
and many go about declaring that America disgraced 
herself among the nations by not officially protesting 
against this act of unrighteousness. For myself, this 
hue and cry over Belgium seems one of the least sensi- 
ble aspects of American discussion. I cannot but ad- 
mire the bold words of the German Chancellor in the 
Reichstag : 

21 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

"Gentlemen, we are now in a state of necessity, and 
necessity knows no law. Our troops have occupied 
Luxemburg and perhaps are already on Belgian soil. 
Gentlemen, that is contrary to the dictates of inter- 
national law. . . . The wrong — I speak openly — that 
we are committing we will endeavor to make good as 
soon as our military goal has been reached. Anybody 
who is threatened as we are threatened, and is fighting 
for his possessions, has only one thought— how he is to 
hack his way through." 

That statement is one of the few sincere utterances 
heard from any European statesman since the war 
began. It rings true. You were terribly threatened; 
you had to strike through Belgium or court ruin. Any 
nation in your predicament would have done the same 
thing. G. Bernard Shaw put the matter squarely be- 
fore Americans early in the war, when he told them: 
'T think, for example, that if Russia made a descent 
on your continent under circumstances which made it 
essential to the maintenance of your national freedom 
that you should move an army through Canada, you 
would ask our leave to do so and take it by force if 
we did not grant it to you. I may reasonably suspect, 
even if all our statesmen raise a shriek of denial, that 
we should take a similar liberty under similar circum- 
stances in the teeth of all the scraps of paper in our 
Foreign Office dustbin." 

That is the true British view, not the sniveling cant 
over the sanctity of treaties. A recent English his- 
torian^ asked, in speaking of the seizure of the Danish 

2H. W. V. Temperley, Life of Canning, 1905. 
28 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

fleet at Copenhagen in 1807, "Would it have been any 
satisfaction, if we had sunk under the pressure from 
Bonaparte, to have died with our eyes fixed on Puffen- 
dorf and the law of nations?" 

You can see, however, why the plea of self-preser- 
vation carries Httle weight here. The American 
throws aside the whole argument from necessity, to 
you so conclusive, because, as I have explained, he 
believes you the aggressor. He regards the invasion 
of Belgium as a dastardly detail in a sinister campaign 
to conquer the world. Furthermore, England has made 
all the capital possible out of your breach of law. 
England's declaration of war followed your violation 
of Belgian neutrality, and she alleged that as her 
cause for entry. It was a lucky stroke for the cabal 
of politicians that controlled Britain, for they had 
committed the naval and military forces of the Empire 
to France in secret agreements while they had openly 
denied these arrangements in the House of Commons. 
They needed an excuse before the country, and Bel- 
gium furnished it to them. Sir Edward Grey and his 
faction did not stage-manage England's negotiations 
for their influence on neutral opinion, but for their 
influence on British public opinion and the recruiting 
campaign. Nevertheless it had its effect here. Curi- 
ously enough there exists in England a strong group 
of protest which is not for a moment taken in by the 
miserable sham of Grey, Churchill and the rest that 
this is a "war to preserve international law" or a "war 
to end war" or anything else on Britain's part but a 

29 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

war of imperialistic jealousy from top to bottom. But 
America, sentimental, credulous, self-righteous, in the 
face of the facts, in the face of England's record, be- 
lieves that England is fighting for the rights of small 
nations. 

It is not reasonable to take tragically the violation 
of Belgium's neutrality because there was very little 
neutrality there to violate. She had practically allied 
herself with France and England. To enter into se- 
cret military agreements with two of the guarantors 
of her neutrality, ostensibly for "defense" but actually 
to the detriment of a third guarantor, was not playing 
the game fairly. Roland G. Usher, a writer who has 
attained prominence in this country by his discussions 
of European affairs, wrote in the Nezu Republic, 
November 28, 1914: 

"The vital difficulty in this question of neutrality 
was and is that the territory of Belgium was not and 
is not neutral ground. It is literally the front door to 
France and the side door to Germany, and its posses- 
sion by either is so dangerous to the other that the 
moment war breaks out or even becomes probable, 
Belgium is either a part of Germany or a part of 
France, and hostile territory for whichever of the two 
does not hold it. . . . Whatever the diplomatic facts 
may be^ whatever the technicalities of alliances and 
treaties eventually prove to have been, Belgium was 
as clearly an ally of France as England was. The 
Belgian army and its dispositions, the Belgian forts on 
the German frontier, were prepared with the advice, 

30 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

at least, of English and French generals. Plans for 
the co-operation of the three armies were undoubtedly 
made. Let us not quibble over the question whether 
this was an infringement of neutrality. The Belgians 
knew— let us say it once more — that the neutrality of 
Belgium was a fiction because Belgium was not neu- 
tral ground." 

Quite so. Belgium was not neutral because she had 
thrown her sympathies to the French, and because she 
had connived with your recognized enemies for the 
employment of her military forces. You had a reason- 
able suspicion that she would not view a French viola- 
tion of her neutrality in the same light as a German 
violation. Few Americans realize what the strategic 
situation was. They conceive of Belgium merely as 
an easy road to France, and the sole purpose of your 
invasion to strike a swift blow at France in order to 
be able later to turn and deal with Russia. But there 
was a more vital matter involved. Belgium borders 
on the most vulnerable portion of Germany, the gr&aX 
industrial district of Westphalia, which includes among 
other vital centers Essen and the Krupp gun works. 
Essen, though east of the Rhine, is less than one hun- 
dred and fifty miles from Antwerp. Cologne, Diissel- 
dorf and Krefeld are nearer. The empire would be 
prostrate once this prosperous and thickly populated 
region of factories, blast furnaces and steel mills fell 
into hostile hands. It is an open secret that the Eng- 
lish military leaders had planned in a war with you to 
blockade your ports by sea and enter Westphalia by 

31 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

land, and so hold Germany by the throat. As a road to 
Paris Belgium was an advantage to you; as a gate to 
Essen it was a warrant of death. Through Belgium 
you could strike France a blow in the face, but through 
Belgium France could stab you in the back. That was 
the nature of the military necessity. 

You suspected, with reason, Belgium's good faith. 
The documents found in the archives of the Belgian 
general staff in Antwerp merely confirmed in part facts 
already thoroughly well known to your military 
authorities. But why, asks the American, didn't Ger- 
many wait to see if France or England intended to 
violate Belgian neutrality? That is the whole point. 
You couldn't wait. In our Southwest when a man 
reaches for his gun we do not expect the other dispu- 
tant to see what use will be made of the gun before he 
draws his own. He acts on a presumption. Men who 
refuse to act on that sort of presumption soon have 
heirs reading their wills. You could not take the 
chance of having Belgium used as a weapon to crush 
you. 

The destruction which hit Belgium, it is true, was a 
terrible penalty for her dereliction, or that of her 
military rulers. We live in a world where, either for 
the nation or the individual, the punishment rarely fits 
the crime. When men play with fire they may be 
frightfully burnt; and war is the only fire that com- 
pares with hell. The apologists and mourners for 
Belgium usually contend that she was justified in seek- 
ing covert aid against the German menace, which 

32 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

proved to be real. But she would have had a thousand 
times better chance to escape disaster had she practised 
a real neutrality and not one interpreted to fit her sup- 
posed interests. When history makes its final reckon- 
ing, I am sure, Belgium will not be found the "black 
indelible blot" on your name which your enemies 
would place there. At least you have the satisfaction 
of knowing that you went about the business like men, 
[ openly and frankly, without the subterfuge and 
hypocrisy practised by the other nations concerned. 

IV 

Barbarians ! Huns ! 

From the beginning of the war your foes have car- 
ried on against you a campaign of atrocity tales as 
unscrupulous and mendacious as that conducted by the 
Greeks against the Bulgars in the Second Balkan War. 
The Belgians issued an official report of alleged Ger- 
man barbarities, and the French and English followed 
suit. Viscount Bryce, well and favorably known on 
this side of the Atlantic, lent his name to the English 
version. These canards are widely believed in Amer- 
ica, but chiefly, I think, by those who wilfully want to 
believe— those whose prejudice blinds them to im- 
partial evidence. Responsible American newspaper 
correspondents, returned from the front where they 
had every opportunity to investigate, have exposed the 
fraud again and again. Your own official document 
on the conduct of war by the Belgians more than 
exonerates you for the reprisal measures you took. 
But these were not "atrocities" as advertised. 

33 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

Of course no one will assert that the sweep of your 
armies through Belgium and France was accomplished 
without occasional instances of pillage, rape and mur- 
der. Such sporadic lapses into crime are to be expected 
in war time. Business is business, says the American ; 
in a far truer sense, war is war. We have reason to 
believe, however, that the iron discipline of the Prus- 
sian armies, unequaled anywhere else, reduces the 
number of these offenses to a minimum. The stories 
that seep through from France — of the bayoneting of 
prisoners, for example, and of German girls shrieking 
to be killed — make us skeptical of the effectiveness of 
the restraints in the other armies. And what will turn 
the stomach of civilization when the final inquest is 
held are the barbarities of the Russian hordes. You 
know that in East Prussia the atrocities of the Cos- 
sacks in 1812, 1813 and 1814 are still recalled, a 
century later. And you know what a saturnalia of 
outrage, cruelty and torture Russian troops perpetrated 
last year in Bukowina, Galicia and East Prussia. The 
official German report of the Russian horrors has been 
tacitly ignored, although the reports of the "atrocities" 
in Belgium have been given the widest possible pub- 
licity. 

There has grown up, in fact, a legend that the Teuton 
in warfare is brutal, savage and ruthless. This legend 
has been carefully fostered in England — again to aid 
the recruiting campaign ; and it has gained wide-spread 
credence in the United States. What has lent color 
to the legend more than anything else is the occasional 

34 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

slaughter of civilians and non-combatants, — as in the 
dropping of Zeppelin bombs on London and other 
English towns, the bombardment of the east coast of 
England by a German fleet, and the sinking of passen- 
ger vessels by submarines. You look upon the killing 
of these non-combatants as the regrettable concomitants 
of legitimate military projects, but a mind hostile in 
opinion to you finds in them proof of your personal 
turpitude. In the fog of war we arrive at a curious 
mental state. What seems justifiable when done by 
our side appears intolerable and execrable when 
practised by the enemy. Thus American sympathizers 
with the Allies wax hot when German airmen shell 
open English towns, but v/atch with composure when 
the aviators of the Allies drop bombs and kill women 
and children in the unfortified German towns of 
Freiburg, Schlettstadt or Karlsruhe. When the French 
use asphyxiating gas they hear the news with grim 
satisfaction, but when you use gas they raise a howl 
of indignation. When you shell a cathedral tower 
they quote the Hague Conventions, but when the Eng- 
lish use dum-dum bullets they shrug their shoulders. 
Sympathy with a belligerent hardens the heart. To 
your ill-wishers in America German heartbreak and 
German agony mean nothing, and German deaths are 
a cause for rejoicing. 

This is the reason why America has not shown 
resentment at. the cynical inhumanity of England and 
France in pitting against you uncivilized yellow, brown 
and negroid troops. In the name of civilization and 

35 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

the higher culture they have launched on your sons 
and husbands the Turco, the Sikh, the Ghoorka, the 
Pathan,! — these savages who cut off the heads iof 
prisoners, make necklaces of eyes they have gouged 
from the wounded, and thrust their knives upward 
through the bowels. "From Senegambia, Morocco, 
the Soudan, Afghanistan, every wild band of robber 
clans, come fighting men to slay the compatriots of 
Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Beethoven, 
Wagner, Mozart, Diirer, Helmholtz, Hertz, Haeckel, 
and a million others, perhaps obscurer, no less noble, 
men of the fatherland of music, of philosophy, of 
science, and of medicine, the land where education is 
a reality and not a farce, the land of Luther and 
Melanchthon, the land whose life-blood washed out 
the ecclesiastical tyranny of the Dark Ages. 
"The Huns!" 



Quite frankly the American press wants to see you 
beaten in this war, to have "Prussian militarism" wiped 
out. If you win, say our sage students of foreign 
affairs, you will override the world like a tyrannical 
colossus, threatening the life of every free people. 
France and England will be annihilated. Who will be 
next? Naturally the United States. As our sapient 
editors are fond of phrasing it, the United States 
"cannot afford" to see the Allies lose. 

The desire to see you defeated springs naturally out 
of the general feeling of antagonism. Some explana- 

36 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

tion of your supposed aggression had to be found. 
How was it that you, notoriously a peace-loving peo- 
ple, suddenly reached up and pulled down the pillars 
of civilization? What was the motive? The answer 
has been militarism — together with autocracy, lust for 
expansion, delusion of a world mission — but always 
first and last, militarism. Nietzsche, Treitschke and 
Bernhardi have been pictured as your popular authors 
and national guides. The Prussian drill sergeant has 
been depicted as your universal educator, who has 
drilled your minds as well as your bodies. The House 
of Hohenzollern has been held up as a dynasty of war- 
lords, afflicted with a Caesarian itch to rule the world. 

In other words, your defamers do their best to 
make of you a bogy. The non-combatant in modern 
war loses all touch with fact and comes to paint the 
enemy as a monster and a demon. No greater libel 
ever has been uttered against a nation than when Ger- 
mans are accused of being a race of militarists. A 
juster description is that you are the most military 
and the least warlike of people. You had in Germany, 
of course, as had every other European power, your 
pro-war party, and it was an insistent and outspoken 
party, but to picture it as anything but a small minority 
is to travesty the truth. Your militarists had no more 
popular support or more effective grip on the govern- 
ment than did the Imperialists of England, or the 
Chauvinists of France, or the Irridentists of Italy; 
the proof lies in the event! 

If you had not maintained a powerful army, where 

37 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

would you be now? Here is Germany, completely 
ringed with hate-stung foes, battling against odds such 
as no other nation ever has had to face, outnumbered 
more than two to one — almost three to one — in men, 
resources and wealth, fighting to preserve her existence 
and even her right to remain a free and united people ; 
yet to hear Englishmen and Americans talk one would 
imagine that the Allies, rather than Germany, were 
the stag at bay! Of late it has become the fashion in 
our journals to cite your "preparedness" as a convinc- 
ing proof of a German conspiracy against the peace 
of the world. I quote a few phrases from a bitter and 
rhetorical article^ in a recent issue of the Saturday 
Evening Post : "Germany . . . has hurled calamity on 
a continent. She has struck to pieces a Europe whose 
very unpreparedness answers her ridiculous falsehood 
that she was attacked first;" "Prussia's long-prepared 
and malignant assault . . . the deadliest assault ever 
made on Democracy;" "Her spring at the throat of 
an unsuspecting, unprepared world." There you have 
it ! Germany was prepared to meet a dangerous attack 
(which actually was made), therefore she must have 
invited the attack, nay, perpetrated it. And such non- 
sense passes for logic! At the war's beginning your 
American enemies predicted that you soon would be 
crushed and taught the folly of challenging a fore- 
warned world; now that you are winning, your 
victories are cited to show how innocent must have 
been the rest of the world so to have been caught 

3"The Pentecost of Calamity" by Owen Wister. 

38 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

napping. Either way you are blamed. When you 
stand off a world and deal your enemies staggering 
blows, you are given no credit for being better gen- 
eralled, for having superior physical stamina, for meet- 
ing with greater ability the complex industrial and 
technical problems of modern war, or for your intenser 
moral earnestness, — this passion of conviction which 
enables you to unlock such marvelous reserves of 
energy. 

No, the explanation is always "preparedness." Yet 
in all save the intangible racial factors your opponents 
were as well prepared as yourselves. The combined 
standing armies of Russia and France before the war 
numbered 2,010,000 soldiers as against your 870,000, 
and the total of their drilled men was 9,500,000 as 
against your 5,500,000. Austria and Turkey were more 
than offset by Great Britain, Servia, Portugal, Italy 
and Japan. On the sea the preparedness of the Allies 
exceeded yours in the proportion of four to one. The 
total output of their arms works and munitions facto- 
ries was greater than yours in the same ratio as their 
armies, and Schneider-Creusot rivaled Krupp. The 
boasts of your enemies last summer, telling what they 
would do to you, shows how highly they thought of 
their armaments. Is it your reproach or theirs that 
those boasts proved somewhat hollow? Why not 
rather give you decent credit for the amazing, almost 
incredible, stand you are making? 

The overworked assertion that civilization will suffer 
if you win is not based on any impartial analysis of 

39 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

German character or purposes, or upon a reasoned 
forecast of historical probabilities. It is sheer malice. 
Probably there is no settlement of this conflict which 
can be entirely satisfactory. For myself I prefer to 
see you win, and win decisively. If Germany is de- 
stroyed, or even greatly hampered in its normal de- 
velopment, one of the world's best hopes will be ex- 
tinguished. But if Germany is victorious, the inter- 
national situation may be much improved. The world 
will be spared an increase in Russia's power, and the 
forcible Russification of more victim peoples. We 
shall avoid a dangerous aggrandizement in the position 
of Japan. A German victory may liberalize the 
electoral system of Prussia,* but nothing will liberalize 
Russia except a crushing defeat and the withdrawal 
of English and French loans to the bureaucracy. 
France will not be annihilated, any more than she was 
after 1870, though she may be forced to part with a 
section of her colonial empire. England will not be 
wiped out, but she may be forced to forego the 
arrogant assumption that the sea is British property. 
The United States can view with composure any 
changes in titles to colonies in Africa or the Near East. 
You will never cross our path. For one thing you will 
be too busy elsewhere! 

Most Americans, of course, do not share this view; 
nothing would please them better than to see Germany 
brought to her knees. It is this popular desire to see 



^Professor Henry C. Emery, "German Economics and the War," Yale 
Review, January, 1915. 

40 



AN EXPLANATION TO GERMANY 

you beaten which so complicates the question of our 
trade in war munitions. That question has not and 
cannot be argued on its merits. However neutral the 
United States has been in its official attitude, it is not 
neutral in sentiment. Americans are glad to supply 
your enemies with arms, because in this way they 
can help avenge the "rape of Belgium" and aid in 
punishing the "disturber of the world's peace." Tech- 
nically, of course, our neutrality is not violated, for 
we have the legal right, by historical usage and by 
article 7 , Convention XIII of the 1907 Hague Confer- 
ence, to sell arms anywhere in the world. Neither, on 
the other hand, would our neutrality be violated by 
placing a complete embargo on the ships carrying 
munitions. To right-thinking men and women this 
whole business of dealing in instruments of destruc- 
tion for profit appears disgusting and abhorrent. How- 
ever, the crux of the question is neither neutrality or 
ethics. While the Allies control the seas export of 
arms aids them, embargo on arms aids you. Conse- 
quently outside of German-Americans, there is little 
demand that Congress suppress this new and monstrous 
billion-dollar industry. 

My German friends, there is one last word I would 
address to you, and this most earnestly of all. Do not 
allow your bitterness against the United States to in- 
crease. Do not regard this country as your confirmed 
enemy, but as a potential friend. Our nation is much 
more divided in its sympathy than it appears to be. 
There are over eight million German-Americans in 

41 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

America, — immigrants or offspring of immigrants. 
There are nearly three millions from Austria-Hungary. 
There are four and a half millions from Ireland, of 
whom a large proportion take a pro-German attitude. 
Besides these millions there are a vast number of men 
and women of older American stock who see the 
justice of your struggle, or at least are lenient in their 
judgment. The laboring men, the common people 
everywhere, do not share the rabid intolerance of our 
pseudo-intellectuals. The anti-German attitude of our 
press gives a false surface of unanimity to American 
opinion. We do not know, as a matter of fact, where 
we should stand if your side had adequate and fair 
representation in the journals of public discussion. 
But be assured of this : what is now called "the Amer- 
ican attitude" toward Germany will not endure for- 
ever. It is, as I have explained to you, based in large 
part on errors in the interpretation of facts. If that is 
so, some day these misinterpretations will be refuted 
and swept away. At bottom America is fair-minded. 
And you have in the United States loyal friends, whose 
eyes refuse to be blinded by calumny, who, not una- 
ware of your faults, love you for your lofty virtues, 
who will fight for you against a world of falsehoods, 
until the truth prevails. Dem glucklichen Tag! 



42 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

WHY are you in this war? 
You are the English; you are now, and will 
continue to be, a great people. You are at present 
united, with the exception of a few ineffective intel- 
lectuals, in a resolve to "crush" Germany, to beat her 
to her knees, to punish her. Hate, when it permeates 
a whole people, becomes a terrible political fact. Yet 
there is no reason why neutrals should sanction and 
condone British hate any more than German hate, or 
Mohammedan hate. Hate always blights, never 
creates, and should hate rule the peace and the set- 
tlement, whichever side wins in the field, we shall 
have a worse Europe than before. It is not, there- 
fore, to your half-crazed wartime mood that I appeal, 
but to whatever measure of cool reason remains among 
you. In every crisis a few Englishmen keep their 
heads; that is one of the sources of British strength. 
Let me ask them, without rancor, one question. 

What are you lighting for? 

You may say ' that the answer is simple : you are 
fighting for democracy, for liberty, for civilization, 
for humanity. Permit me to point out that these vague 
phrases in themselves mean exactly nothing. Each of 
the belligerents believes it is fighting for "civilization." 

43 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

The idealism of the German people is as sincere, and 
their earnestness as intense, to say the least, as your 
own. High-sounding pretensions must be translated 
into concrete terms to gain significance. 

An explanation would come from you in good grace, 
for on the face of it your position in the war is peculiar. 
You are fighting on the side of Russia, a despotic and 
half-Asiatic power which has little in common with 
Western civilization, and whose interests are in no way 
identical with those of the British Empire, and you 
are fighting against Germany, a people of the same 
stock as yourselves, with the same general social pur- 
poses, whom the deeper racial and cultural forces 
would seem to mark as your natural ally. Indeed, 
/ your choice of sides in this struggle is a great histori- 
j cal anomaly, second only to the anomaly of the war 
i itself. How did that alignment come about? Of 
course there are reasons. But are the reasons those 
which have been alleged by your statesmen and 
publicists? Behind this question lies another: What 
are you striving to accomplish in this conflict? What 
purposes do you hope to achieve by that victory of 
which you are still so confident? 

This is not an academic discussion. These are politi- 
cal questions of the greatest urgency, both for English- 
men and, indirectly, for citizens of the United States. 
It is of the first importance that we think rightly on 
these issues, not merely that we may save our own 
souls by finding the truth, but that, having embraced 
the truth, we may save Europe and the world. 

44 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 
II 

Are you fighting for Belgium? 

You must admit that for many of the British public 
Belgium was England's casus belli. Hundreds of 
thousands of your best young men have enlisted in 
the service of the King, believing that they are taking 
up arms to defend a little country against a brutal 
aggression. From your press and platform have come 
the strongest assertions that England is fighting a 
righteous war to vindicate the sanctity of treaties and 
uphold the rights of small nations. No consideration 
has won you sympathy in neutral countries more 
readily than this plea. 

Do you still insist on the pose of the knightly 
rescuer? Let me call your attention to two or three 
incontrovertible aspects of your relation to Belgium. 

1. Sir Edward Grey had, in secret commitments, 
unconditionally pledged the naval and military forces 
of the Empire to France in case of a European war. 
These secret agreements, contracted as far back as 
1906 and frequently renewed, known to only a few 
members of the Cabinet, were not announced to Parlia- 
ment and the British nation until August 3, 1914, when 
the armies of the Continent were already on the march. 
They would have thrown you into war in any case, 
Belgium or no Belgium. It is said on good authority 
that Sir Edward Grey planned, in event of repudiation 
by his own Cabinet, to form a Coalition Cabinet in 
August, 1914 — as was done months later — and proceed 
to carry out his "obligations of honor." That these 

45 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

agreements were contracted in secret, without the 
knowledge of the British people, does not alter the 
fact that they were a binding action of the British 
government. 

2. Germany made a definite bid for your neutrality 
on the score of Belgian integrity. If your government 
had been actuated by any idealistic concern for small 
nationalities why did it not intervene to preserve 
Belgium when it could? Sir Edward Grey was asked 
point blank by Ambassador Lichnowsky whether he 
would keep Britain out of the war if Belgian neutrality 
were respected (celebrated dispatch No. 123, British 
White Paper). Your Foreign Secretary answered, 
no, his hands must be free, — meaning, of course, that 
his hands already were tied. When war came, Great 
Britain's action was mortgaged. "If France became 
involved we should be drawn in" (No. 111). England 
might have, indeed would have, saved Belgium had 
Belgian welfare been a primary object of British 
statesmanship ; but it was not. 

3. Belgium was used shamelessly as a pawn in the 
great game between the Triple Alliance and the Triple 
Entente. Your little neighbor, by the accident of its 
position, is of the greatest strategic importance, either 
for an offensive against France or an offensive against 
Germany. Your Foreign Office urged the Belgians to 
"maintain to the utmost of their power their neutral- 
ity" (White Paper No. 115). France pressed armed 
aid on Belgium before its course was announced. 
British and French strategists for years had been 

46 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

hatching secret military plans with the Belgian Gen- 
eral Staff. These plans did not, it is true, foreshadow 
direct aggression on Belgium, but surely they indicated 
the most cynical willingness to use the Belgian army 
as a first line of defense for the Entente. When war 
broke out the "plucky Belgians" rendered you a most 
valuable service in delaying the march of the Teutonic 
hosts. What, I ask you in all frankness, did you do 
for Belgium ? Belgium was desolated ; she was caught 
and ground to pieces between the huge rival alliances 
of Europe. The action of your government, playing 
the game of the balance of power, amounted to nothing 
less than a ghastly betrayal of Belgian interests. 

The above observations, I submit, are based on 
facts; I do not admit that they are disputable. I give 
them thus briefly because they have been emphasized 
already by many British writers. I need mention only 
the names of Dr. F. C. Conybeare,^ E. D. Morel,^ 
H. N. Brailsford,^ Ramsay Macdonald,* and Bernard 
Shaw,^ Even the London Times, in a leader of March 
12, 1915, repudiated chivalry for Belgium: "Herr von 
Bethmann-Hollweg is quite right. Even had Germany 
not invaded Belgium, honor and interest would have 
united us with France." 

Yet I know what reply you, the better class of 
Englishmen, would give to the foregoing. You would 

'Conybeare, letter in Vital Issue. 
^Morel, Letter to Birkenhead Liberal Association. 
^Brailsford, Belgium and "The Scrap of Paper." 
*Macdonald, Statement in the Labor Leader. 
°Shaw, Common Sense About the War. 

47 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

say: "This indictment of the past is all very well. I 
dare say our statesmen juggled with Belgium, and I 
have never been a partisan of secret diplomacy. That 
is no reason why we should forsake Belgium now. 
The bald fact remains that she has been trampled under 
foot by Germany, that she is now invaded and held in 
subjection. It is England's duty to fight on until the 
last invader is cleared from Belgian soil." 

I give you full credit for honesty in this sentiment. 
Your aim is generous; but you have chosen futile 
means. You wish to avenge Belgium by force of arms. 
It cannot be done. 

Suppose you are successful; that you drive back 
the Germans, yard by yard, to their own territory. 
What does that mean for Belgium? Merely a second 
devastation more terrible than the first. By again 
making Belgium the world's battlefield, you will scorch 
her bare. There is a better way out. Why should 
Germany care to retain Belgian territory? Only as a 
weapon against you. "Antwerp is a pistol pointed at 
the heart of England." Strategically Belgium has 
value; politically and financially she would be a liabil- 
ity. As soon as you convince the Germans that Eng- 
land is not perpetrating a huge aggression to destroy 
her, Belgium will be evacuated without cost to the 
Belgians; not before. I agree that no settlement of 
this conflict can be satisfactory which does not restore 
Belgium's independence and make her such measure 
of reparation as may be possible. But in that reparation 
you have a share to pay as well as Germany. 

48 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

Let us, in the name of decency, drop this twaddle 
about the rights of small nationalities. Consider your 
allies. You stood calmly aside when Russia throttled 
Finland, and when she crushed Persian independence 
with atrocities more gruesome than the alleged German 
atrocities. You applauded Japan in violating China's 
neutrality to march on Kiao Chou. Your Foreign 
Office actively supported France when she tore up the 
public law of Europe as embodied in the Act of 
Algeciras and subjected Morocco to military terrorism 
and financial strangulation. Do you insist on one 
moral code for your enemies and approve an opposite 
for your friends ? Your own record in Ireland should 
close your lips against pious platitudes about small 
nations. You did not enter this war to protect Bel- 
gium. You will never render her effective service 
until you are prepared to bargain concessions or 
colonies to secure her interests. That, apparently, you 
are not ready to do. 

What are you fighting for? Not Belgium! 

Ill 

Possibly you are in this war to safeguard France. 
La Belle France! You could not bear to see your 
closest friend crushed to earth. If that is your motive 
it is a laudable one. The whole world holds France 
precious. 

You will admit, however, that this deep affection is 
rather a sudden attachment. For centuries the French 
and British peoples fought and snarled at one another. 

49 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

You hated France when France was strong. Even 
within the last quarter century there were three occa- 
sions when you stood on the brink of war with her, — 
over Siam, West Africa, and the Nile Valley 
(Fashoda). But in 1904 your Foreign Office reached 
a general agreement with France on all outstanding 
disputes. In 1906 it came to an understanding with 
Russia, and so the Entente Cordiale was formed. From 
that day on the peace of Europe was never safe. While 
the Triple Alliance was the most powerful military 
force in Europe the dogs were chained, but when a 
stronger combination (presumably) arose, the politics 
of Europe steadily underwent a sinister transforma- 
tion. Let us see what happened. 

The British Foreign Office definitely abandoned 
Salisbury's policy of a Concert for a system of rival 
military groups. The Entente did not confine itself 
to a defensive league against a possible attack, but 
began openly or clandestinely to balk and bully and 
injure its rivals in time of peace. Sir Edward Grey 
at once signed a general Anglo-French declaration 
regarding Egypt and Morocco, in which the French 
government averred that it had no intention "of altering 
the political status of Morocco." This was followed 
by the publication of a Franco-Spanish declaration of 
similar tenor. At the same time that these public 
declarations of good faith appeared Sir Edward Grey 
entered into secret agreements with France and Spain 
which provided for the partition of Morocco between 
the two latter countries and rendered the integrity of 

SO 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

the Moorish kingdom a sham.« Germany had vast 
economic interests in Morocco. What became of 
them? They were wrested from her. Germany was 
robbed, underhandedly, and furthermore was humili- 
ated, insulted, slapped in the face. Morocco, whose 
independence was guaranteed not only by the public 
declarations of 1904, but also by the international Act 
of Algeciras of 1906, signed by all the powers, was 
ruthlessly reduced to a French dependency. Morocco 
in time of "peace" was treated worse than Belgium in 
time of war. 

To all this Germany did not submit without a pro- 
test. She intervened twice, once at Tangier in the 
person of the Emperor, and again at Agidir with the 
Panther. In these interventions she was entirely 
within her rights, and in accord with what Mr. Morel 
calls ''the fundamental legality of her attitude." And 
both times Europe nearly plunged into war because 
\ Britain interfered to back up France in an aggression 
/ where she was morally and legally wrong. In both 
instances, mind you, your Foreign Office did not inter- 
fere with merely diplomatic weapons, but with the 
threat of the whole military and naval forces of Great 



6The Moroccan intrigue served more than anything else to embitter 
Anglo-German relations, and helped to usher in the present war. The 
authority for the statements in the text is to be found in Morocco in 
Diplomacy by E. D. Morel, first published in London in 1912, and 
reissued as Ten Years of Secret Diplomacy in 1915. Mr. Morel pre- 
sents the history of the affair with such a wealth of detailed proof, with 
such evident impartiality and with so genuine a concern for the best 
interests of England and ef Europe that I venture to state no fair- 
minded man can read the book unconvinced. 

51 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

Britain, — offered, in the event of a Franco-German 
rupture, to mobilize the fleet, seize the Kiel canal and 
land 100,000 men in Schleswig-Holstein. These facts 
were laid bare in the Lausanne disclosures of 1905 
and the Faber revelations of 1911. One immediate 
effect was to leave the whole German nation rocking 
and seething with indignation, and to convince Ger- 
many that England would precipitate a European war 
on the first pretext. 

In the end Germany lost all of her interests in 
Morocco, though a slice of land in the interior of the 
French Congo was thrown to her as a sop. The secret 
clauses of the 1904 Declarations finally were revealed 
in Le Temps and Le Matin, November, 1911. But 
Germany had wind of them as early as October, 1904. 
Says Mr. Morel (remember that he wrote in 1912) : 
"Thenceforth dated the situation which for more than 
seven years has poisoned the whole European atmos- 
phere, embroiled British, French, German, and Spanish 
relations, and placed an enormous and constantly grow- 
ing burden of added expenditure upon the peoples of 
those countries. Thenceforth dated the situation which 
Sir Edward Grey, instead of seeking to improve by 
orienting his policy after Algeciras in a more friendly 
spirit toward Germany — retaining what was good but 
rejecting what was bad in the policy of his predeces- 
sor — has aggravated and worsened to such a degree 
that only yesterday we escaped a general conflagration. 
Veritably the process of being a party to the stealing 
of another man's land brings with it its own Nemesis. 

52 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

Unfortunately it is the people in whose name, but 
without whose sanction, these things are done, who 
have to pay." And again : "I understand that in the 
current jargon of diplomacy that sort of thing is called 
'high politics.' The plain man may be permitted to 
dub it by one word only — dishonesty." 

Yes, it was dishonest diplomacy, just as it was dis- 
honest statesmanship in 1914 to deny in the House of 
Commons that the country was pledged to France, 
and then to reveal, after war actually had broken out, 
secret obligations of honor. England's naval and mili- 
tary power has been mortgaged to France in case of a 
war with Germany for the last ten years, uncon- 
ditionally, and without reference, apparently, to the 
nature of the quarrel and the crisis. It was so in 
1905, it was so in 1911, and it was so in August, 1914. 
The British Foreign Office had become saturated with 
anti-German feeling, with suspicion and unfairness. 
This anti-German cabal, typified by such men as 
Tyrrell, Nicholson and Bertie, did all it could to stul- 
tify international good-will, and, through the press, to 
prejudice and embitter public opinion. Sir Edward 
Grey worked hand and glove with this cabal, although 
his anti-Germanism seems to have been diluted with 
a pale pacifism which made him shudder, at the last 
moment, on the edge of that catastrophe he had done 
so much to make inevitable. The culpability of 
Britain is no less because these machinations were car- 
ried on behind the scenes and without the overt sanc- 
tion of the British people. In foreign affairs the 

53 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

Foreign Office was Britain. And when the great test 
came it was able to carry the country into war. 

For France, then, are you fighting ? For the France 
of gaiety, of beauty, of philosophy? What did your 
diplomatic intriguers care for the ideal France ? They 
were playing a high and baleful game, the game of 
the Balance of Power, in which Germany was to be 
outmatched, the game of the ring-fence. England's 
creation of the Entente, or rather the way she manipu- 
lated her influence after it was accomplished, had an 
evil influence on the politics of both her allies. In 
Russia the loans of British gold strengthened a weak- 
ening bureaucracy; the decline of the Duma dates 
from that sinister aid.'^ In France it caused the fires 
of La Revanche to burn brighter. It gave political 
power to the French Colonial Party and threw the 
republic into the hands of adventurers. It thwarted 
every movement toward a Franco-German rapproche- 
ment, inspiring, for example, those influences which 
brought about the overthrow of Caillaux. Was ever 
game more stupid, or in the end more disastrous? As 
it was diplomacy without honesty, so it was statesman- 
ship without enlightenment. What price Britain pays 
we already begin to see. It served directly and need- 
lessly to undermine what is one of the greatest interests 
of true statesmanship, the peace of the world. 

And mark you! This France to which you so ef- 
fectively allied yourself was bound by the strongest 

^See Persia, Finloind, and our Russian Alliance, pamphlet o£ the 
Independent Labor Party. 

54 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

of agreements to Russia. Her war policy was part 
and parcel of Russia's policy. Why is France now 
at war? Is it because she was wantonly invaded by 
Germany, or because she is fulfilling her pledges to 
Russia? Let there be no mistake in this matter. 
France came into the struggle automatically as Rus- 
sia's ally. Though there was some silly pose at the 
beginning — what Americans would call "a grandstand 
play" — about withdrawing ten kilometers behind the 
frontier, there never was any doubt as to France's 
action. "France is resolved to fulfil all the obligations 
of her alliance."^ Yet this quarrel was at first a Rus- 
sian affair. It was a dispute over the Balkans between 
Servia and Russia on one side and Austria and Ger- 
many on the other. Let me quote another English- 
man. G. Lowes Dickinson says:^ "So far as Russia 
is concerned, I believe Germany to be on the defensive." 
Well, if that is so, then Germany is on the defensive 
against the world. The nations had strung themselves 
on a single cord, the handle to which was the Franco- 
Russian alliance. When Russia jerked that handle, 
the nations were all pulled in, — France, Great Britain, 
Belgium. France was a link; you are really the ally 
of Russia. 

To be the ally of unregenerate, medieval Russia is 
a national infamy. But you cannot see that. 

The attitude of cultivated Englishmen toward Rus- 

^Statement of Viviani to the French embassadors at St. Petersburg 
and London, July 30, 1914. French Yellow Book, No. 101. 
^The War and the Way Out, p. 16. 

55 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

sia illustrates how the partisanship of war warps the 
mind. At one time you understood the real Russia 
and dreaded and abhorred that reign of the secret 
police called its government. But an ally can do no 
wrong. So far as possible Englishmen now mentally 
turn their backs on Russia, and whenever they are 
forced to look at her they put on rose-colored spectacles 
lest they see the truth. Arnold Bennett, in one of the 
most unsportsmanlike defenses^" of British diplomacy 
which has been published, declares that so far as Eng- 
land is concerned, Russia is an accident. An accident ! 
An accident composed of 170,000,000 people which in- 
creases at the rate of 3,000,000 a year, with all those 
millions conscripted and marshalled by the most soul- 
less, oppressive, unscrupulous autocracy in the world! 
For the Germans this vast Tatar nation is no accident. 
"We in the West, as Marcel Sembat pointed out some 
months before he entered the French Cabinet, have 
never quite realized how Germans regard Russia. For 
us she is a safely distant power. We can afford to 
think of her novels and her music. We can personify 
her as a nation which produced Tolstoy and Kropot- 
kin.^^ We know her through her exiles. For the Ger- 
mans she is the semi-barbarous neighbor across the 
frontier, with the population which is eighty per cent 
illiterate, and those Cossacks whose name still recalls 
the devastations of the Seven Years War."^^ Yet the 

^"Liberty. 

i^Kropotkin by all means. See his The Terror in Russia, 1909. 
"H. N. Brailsford in The New Republic, July 24, 1915. 
56 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

truth about Russia is not hard to ascertain. Since the 
war started all the forces of reaction have been 
strengthened. The labor leaders, every liberal element, 
have been terrorized ; the Jews, already ground under 
heel, have been subjected to new and horrible indigni- 
ties; all constitutional rights in Finland have been 
stamped out. The Duma has been prorogued and 
silenced. Russia uses the support of her liberal allies 
to slump further back into despotism. This war is 
the great catastrophe ; it overshadows all else. But the 
next greatest crime against civilization is the fact that 
the three greatest cultural nations of the West, Eng- 
land, Germany and France, instead of standing 
shoulder to shoulder against the Asiatic powers, are 
tearing at each other's vitals, with two of the three 
arrayed against the third at the behest and in the 
interest of this unspeakable bureaucracy. Who is re- 
sponsible for this irrational, this unholy alliance? I 
leave the answer to you. 

IV 

"But away with all this talk of policies and politics," 
you cry. "Let us get down to the fundamental issue, 
Germany herself. Why are we at war? Look at our 
foe for your answer! We could not abide a world 
forever overawed by this menace of Prussianism! 
These barbarians ! These veritable Huns ! This mod- 
ern Attila ! This perverted nation of militarists ! This 
incarnate blood-lust and egotism ! This — " 

Save your vocabulary. We have heard more than 

57 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

enough of vituperation within the past year. I know 
that you, the better class of Enghshmen — and that is 
the only sort I am addressing — have had no part in 
the shameless and cowardly abuse of Germans which 
has filled your press during the war period. Still it is 
true, I believe, that your conception of Germany is 
compounded in part of fictions. How could it be 
otherwise? For a decade certain sections of British 
opinion have made it their interest to slander and mis- 
represent your great Teutonic neighbor. Within the 
last months these defamers have used their blackest 
colors; they do not picture a people at all, but a 
grotesque caricature of something which started out 
to be superhuman and ended in being inhuman. Out 
of the fog of war they have fashioned a bogy, a mon- 
ster which bears no more resemblance to the Germany 
across the North Sea than does an image of Moloch 
to a man. All Englishmen appear to share, in greater 
or less degree, this bogy-belief. 

To refute each canard, to strip bare and expose each 
fiction, would be impossible. But some categorical 
statements should be made. Germans are not inhuman 
brutes, delighting in atrocities; in the conduct of this 
war they have shown themselves no more cruel and 
brutal than the French, and far less so than the Rus- 
sians and your brown and black native troops. The 
Teuton is not by nature bestial, bloodthirsty, or merci- 
less any more than is the Briton or any other civilized 
European, and he yields to the evil passions of war no 
more readily. Germanic civilization is not inferior to ' 

58 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

French or English or Italian civilization, though dif- 
ferent; on the contrary it might well be maintained 
that the only nation which has abolished poverty, the 
one whose educational system is the best in the world, 
whose municipal governments are models, which out- 
strips all nations in scientific and industrial energy, 
shows distinct elements of superiority. The Germans 
are not mad with military ambition, nor bent on any 
career of world conquest, determined to impose the 
German language and German institutions on unwill- 
ing peoples. They asked for a place in the sun. But 
a place in the sun is not the whole earth. 

Come, let us be reasonable. In plain justice you 
must admire the Germans, even though you do not 
love them. If Anglo-Saxon civilization is musk in 
your nostrils, Teutonic civilization cannot be stench. 
In the arts of peace the Germans challenge emulation. 
In war they are the astonishment of all history. No 
other people could have withstood so overwhelming a 
coalition. Not only in a military and technical man- 
ner are they proving their strength, but in a moral and 
intellectual way too. In England you have an op- 
pressive censorship; and you have lost for the time 
being many of your constitutional rights. In Ger- 
many the censorship confines itself to its proper duty 
of suppressing military information; there the most 
unfriendly news is published, including the daily Brit- 
ish and French war bulletins ; in any German city one 
may read the current English and French newspapers, 
and buy the books and pamphlets written to expose 

59 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

German guilt. Is it so with you? Or in Russia or 
France? Does this mean anything except that the 
German people, alone among the belligerents, are al- 
lowed freely to face the truth? And there are Eng- 
lishmen who still speak of this as the Kaiser's war, or 
a Junkers' war! 

For the Germans this is a people's war, in the fullest 
sense of the term. The great spiritual fact of the 
struggle is this flaming, unbroken conviction of the 
German people that they are right. Though your 
statesmen may have been successful with Russia, 
France and Italy, they have done very badly with 
Germany. They have not left a single German, high 
or low, with the smallest doubt that Britain engineered 
(a conspiracy to destroy its rival. The explanation is 
simple. The Germans look to history, remote and 
recent. Englishmen w^ork themselves into a great 
consternation over what Prussian militarism is going 
to do; and they try to frighten neutrals with pen- 
pictures of its future depredations. But Germans 
point to the actual performances of Prussian militar- 
ism, and contrast them with the concrete performances 
of British imperialism. 

They point out, for example, that this terrible 
menace of Prussianism, to which you impute such evil 
designs, has kept the peace in Europe since 1870; that 
it never seized a favorable opportunity to precipitate 
war, and neglected to attack Russia when crippled by 
Japan, France during the Dreyfus affair, England 
when the Boers disclosed her weakness. They recall 

60 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

that the German government, in the face of a hostile 
press at home, sacrificed German interests in Morocco 
in order to avoid a European conflagration. And they 
ask, has British imperiaHsm ever refrained from ag- 
gression when its "interests" were involved? England 
has formed coalitions successively against Spain, Hol- 
land and France; she has swept from the sea every 
fleet which dared to rival her own. Her recent atti- 
tude toward Germany has been of a piece with this 
historic policy ; the efforts of her statesmen have aimed 
consistently at the enfeeblement and the isolation of 
Germany. 

One of the British prophets of this war was Pro- 
fessor Cramb. In his book he wrote : " 'France,' said 
Bismarck in September, 1870, 'must be paralyzed ; for 
she will never forgive us our victories.' And in the 
same spirit Treitschke avers : England will never for- 
give us our strength. And not without justice he 
delineates English policy throughout the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries as aimed consistently at the 
repression of Prussia." 

What are you fighting for? 

Here is your answer. The repression of Prussia! 
Since Germany became a power, and particularly since 
she began to build a navy, she aroused increasing dis- 
like and distrust amongst you. In 1897 the Saturday 
Review announced the slogan Germaniam esse deleft- 
dam, and that program has been steadily backed by 
a powerful element of British opinion. Your states- 
men have pursued the old, unimaginative politics of 

61 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

annoyances and curbs; they have done their utmost 
to balk every German attempt at expansion in Africa 
or in Asia, and sometimes their interference has been 
nothing short of wantonly malicious, as in the instances 
of Morocco and of the Bagdad Railway. Militarism 
in Germany? Of course there is militarism there, and 
some of its aspects are not bright. But why not? 
British policy for a decade and more has done all in 
its power to create a military temper in Germany, to 
throw her into the hands of the war party, and to lash 
into being that tigerish ferocity with which she now 
fights you. Commercial jealousy and irritation in 
manufacturing circles, blended with imperialistic 
voracity and certain calculations (or miscalculations) 
of high politics, have led Great Britain into an anti- 
German policy and an anti-German war. 

You will resent this answer to our question. To 
declare that England is fighting, not for Belgium, not 
for France, not for the sanctity of treaties or human 
rights, but merely for selfish imperialistic reasons, and 
rather ill-conceived reasons at that, strikes you, I am 
sure, as grossly distorted. When you look into your 
own souls you find no such sordid motives. You find 
only an intense love of England and of England's 
honor, and a sense of British quality and worth. I 
know how you feel and I know that the things you 
cherish are realities. But these noble realities, I sub- 
mit, have very little to do with the beginning of this 
war, or its end. 

And you could see this too, were you able, even for 

62 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 



one brief hour, to throw yourselves into complete sym- 
pathy with your opponents, and look at the world 
through their eyes. Had you attempted any such 
sympathetic understanding of Germany two years ago, 
this war, I am convinced, never would have happened. 
You would have seen that the very future existence 
of Germany depends on her overseas markets, and 
that she must be able to guard these at all costs. As 
it is, you have been applying one logic to Germany and 
another to England. You have looked upon the Ger- 
man navy as an impertinence and a threat, even though 
the growth of the German navy has been accompanied 
by a constant demand for the freedom of the seas 
(i. e., the abolition of the capture of private property 
at sea). But you have never been able to see that the 
British navy, nearly twice as large, is a threat (to 
Germany and possibly to others) especially when ac- 
companied by a stubborn and effective refusal to have 
the seas neutralized. You could denounce colonial 
greed in Germany, and stand ready to fight her if she 
acquired an African colony, or a naval base in the 
Atlantic; but British expansion, though unlimited, 
seemed justified, no matter at whose expense ; and you 
could applaud when Bonar Law announced in July, 
1915, that the Entente Allies had torn from the Teutons 
450,000 square miles of colonial possessions. What is 
meat for you, you declare to be poison for Germany. 
You tried, in your supremacy, to enforce a dictation 
on others to which you would not submit for a moment. 
The worst you can properly say of Germany is that 

63 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

she challenged that supremacy, and that she may yet 
force you to treat her as an equal. 

The vital question remains: What of the future? 
The past is past; it must bury its dead. To fix the 
blame, to point the accusing finger, to try to anticipate 
the condemnation of history, is in itself a fruitless 
task. After all, the stupidest people in the world are 
they who — on whichever side — wish to "punish" some 
one for this war, — this ultimate calamity in which each 
belligerent shares a portion of the guilt. What strikes 
one in this gigantic struggle between the British and 
German nations is not so much its wickedness and its 
fierceness, as its needlessness, its utter irrationality. 
Germany is, as I said before, your natural ally; there 
are a thousand valid reasons for friendship to one 
valid reason for hostility. Is it too late to hope for a 
reconcihation between these two great peoples which 
are so alike in their virtues, however much they may 
differ in their faults? I think you begin to see what 
a task you have on your hands in seeking to humble 
a nation so strong and so indignant as Germany. How- 
ever the war results, neither Germany nor England 
can be annihilated. And that is well, for there is room 
for both in the world. The highest ideal of inter- 
national development is not a level uniformity, but 
many divergent cultures, each intensifying its own 
peculiar merits. Will it be impossible for the English 
to put their pride — even though it turn out to be a 
wounded pride — behind them, and make that great 
effort toward a sympathetic understanding of Ger- 

64 



A QUESTION FOR ENGLAND 

many which should have been made long ago? We 
may hope that the effort can be made, for in the final 
restoration of Anglo-German friendship lies one of 
the world's best hopes, and the strongest guarantee of 
future peace. 



65 



FRANCE! 

THERE are times when we have to speak sharply 
to those we love best. The friends of France 
will remonstrate" with her, and the sincerer their af- 
fection the plainer will be their speech. 

For France is living in a dream, wrapped in illusion. 
Because she suffers much she thinks her cause is just, 
and because her soul is high she imagines her deed is 
good. Every nation at war tends to idealize its mo- 
tives, and this is particularly true of this world-war, — 
possibly just for the reason that most of its causes 
were selfish. The nations enlist under the banners of 
truth and righteousness, of humanity and pity, of 
liberty and civilization. But the discerning everywhere 
see through the sham. In England there are people 
who call this sort of thing "tosh," and in America 
there are many who call it "buncombe." In most 
countries these grandiose sentiments are not taken 
with entire seriousness ; but with you, apparently, yes. 
No motive is too altruistic or too noble for you to pro- 
claim. You furnish the world an example of national 
self-deception. 

The truth is often like a shower of ice-water. It 
is gratifying to vaunt the glory of France or to inveigh 
against the wickedness of the enemy; but it is not so 

66 ' 



FRANCE 

pleasant tojalk^of secret treaties, of Russian securities 
held by French investors, of the subjugation of 
Morocco, or of the intrigues of the Colonial party. 
Yet the one is ebullitions of the war spirit, while the 
other represents the realities of history. The French 
are a proud, a gifted, and a sensitive race. But does 
your pride exempt you from facing the facts? Why 
is it that you ignore or slur over aspects of this strug- 
gle which are so desperately clear to an outsider ? 

Any sane discussion of the part France is playing 
in the war must center about the Franco-Russian 
alliance. That is the cardinal fact. A quarrel breaks 
out between Servia and Austria-Hungary. The occa- 
sion is the murder of the Austrian heir, but the real 
dispute is the balance of power in the Balkans. To 
settle the supremacy of the Near East, Germany and 
Russia fly at one another's throats. But the West is 
dragged in, and the whole world flames up, — for what 
reason? Because France acts with Russia. France 
makes Russian interests, Russian designs, Russian 
ambitions, her own. 

G. Lowes Dickinson calls this long-standing bargain 
of yours with the Terror in the North an "unholy 
alliance." But let that go for the moment. The 
motives which prompted France to champion Russia 
are a separate question. First of all let us agree on 
the simple fact that France's action was conditioned on 
that of her ally. There has been a notable lack of 
straightforwardness in discussing this point, and some 
of you have tried to delude yourselves into the notion 

67 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

that you were wantonly attacked. At the beginning 
of the war, for example, your political and military 
leaders showed the greatest concern not to commit 
any act of "aggression." French troops were with- 
drawn ten kilometers behind the frontier. Was this 
ostrich-like act of innocence undertaken to impress 
the French populace, or to impress the outside world? 
Can you deny that France was already committed to 
fight for her northern ally? Was there anything at 
all which Germany could have done, or left undone, 
which would have kept you out? 

On July 29, 1914, the Russian ambassador at Paris 
telegraphed to Sazonof : "Viviani has just confirmed 
to me the French government's firm determination to 
act in concert with Russia. This determination is 
upheld by all classes of society and by the political 
parties, including the Radical Socialists" (Russian 
Orange Book, No. 55). The same day Sazonof tele- 
graphed back: "Please inform the French govern- 
ment . . . that we are sincerely grateful to them for 
the declaration which the French ambassador made me 
on their behalf, to the effect that we could count clearly 
upon the assistance of our ally, France. In the 
existing circumstances, that declaration is especially 
valuable to us" (Orange Book, No. 58). 

These quotations are from a hundred possible. 
Every line in both the Russian Orange Book and the 
French Yellow Book confirms the allegiance of France 
to Russia. Every statesman in Europe knew what 
your attitude would be. The Germans understood it; 

68 



FRANCE 

yet they pressed you for an open statement of your 
intentions. Your only answer was to mobilize the en- 
tire army and the fleet. 

Viviani acted throughout in complete subservience 
to Russia. At the same time he acted with a re- 
markable absence of candor toward Germany. Let 
me illustrate. On July 31 he informed his ambassador 
at St. Petersburg that "Baron von Schoen [German 
ambassador at Paris] finally asked me, in the name of 
his government, what the attitude of France would be 
in case of a war between Germany and Russia. He 
told me that he would come for my reply tomorrow 
[Saturday] at 1 o'clock. / have no intention of mak- 
ing any statement to him on this subject, and I shall 
confine myself to telling him that France will have re- 
gard to her interests. The government of the Re- 
public need not indeed give any account of her inten- 
tions except to her ally" (French Yellow Book, No. 
117). On the following day, August 1, Viviani had 
the audacity to telegraph to his ambassadors abroad, 
"This attitude of breaking ofif diplomatic relations 
without direct dispute, and although he [i. e.. Baron 
von Schoen] has not received any definitely negative 
answer, is characteristic of the determination of Ger- 
many to make war against France" (Yellow Book, No. 
120). How, in the name of Janus, was Germany to 
receive "any definitely negative answer" if Viviani 
refused to "make any statement on this subject"? 
What would you call this sort of thing in ordinary 
afifairs, — hypocrisy or deceit? This attempt to cloak 

69 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

hostile designs with silence deceives no one; it was 
perfectly clear what French "intentions" were. You 
intended to strike Germany from the west, should she 
be at war with Russia in the east. 

Let us not try to evade a patent truth. The histori- 
cal fact, from which there is no escape, is that you 
were bound to go in if Russia went in. Perhaps your 
treaty made it obligatory on you to fight by the side 
of Russia; in any event there was no disposition on 
the part of your leaders to keep the sword sheathed. 
All that talk in the days of the crisis about patrols 
crossing the frontiers, about German troops firing on 
French outposts, and about French aeroplanes flying 
over German territory, does not touch the core of the 
situation. These allegations, from whichever side, 
are mere banalities and pose. The die was cast; it 
had been cast for years. Even if you impute the most 
sinister motives to Germany, even if you prove to 
your own satisfaction that she started on a career of 
world domination, you do not demonstrate that she 
wanted to make war on France in 1914. Whatever 
her motives, Germany would have preferred to deal 
with one enemy at a time, would she not? It would 
have been far better for her, you must acknowledge, 
to fight Russia alone, than to grapple at the same time 
with Russia, France, England, and all their allies. 

For you, therefore, to declare that you suffered an 
unprovoked attack, and that you are now purely on 
the defensive, is to fall short of an honest avowal. 
Germany, it is true, sent you an ultimatum and put a 

70 



FRANCE 

time-limit on your preparations ; and at the end of that 
limit she invaded your territory. These, however, 
were acts necessary to her plan of strategy. She knew 
you were bent on fighting. Why should she not seize 
the initial advantage? If you persist in describing 
yourselves as being on the defensive it is merely be- 
cause no nation ever admits that it is acting on the 
aggressive. Of this there is a striking example in 
French history. Napoleon Bonaparte toyed with the 
notion that he was merely defending himself. In Sir 
Walter Scott's Life of Napoleon the following conver- 
sation between the emperor and his minister Decres 
is recorded. The conversation takes place immediately 
after Napoleon's marriage with Maria Louisa. 

Napoleon — "The good citizens rejoice sincerely at 
my marriage, monsieur?" 

Decres — "Very much, Sire." 

Napoleon — "I understand they think the lion will 
go to slumber, ha?" 

Decres — "To speak the truth. Sire, they entertain 
some hopes of that nature." 

Napoleon — "They are mistaken: yet it is not the 
fault of the lion: slumber would be as agreeable to 
him as to others. But see you not that while I have 
the air of being the attacking party, I am, in fact, 
acting only on the defensive?" 

There has been altogether too much use made of 
this phrase "on the defensive." If you, France, are 
on the defensive, it is only in that attenuated sense 
that a victory of Germany over Russia would have 

71 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

tilted the balance of power in favor of Germany. But 
why were you interested in the balance of power? 
Why were you, the innocent and idealistic French, 
interested in wars and military combinations? The 
whole question, you see, simmers down to this : Why 
were you in alliance with Russia? 

Surely it was not on account of sympathy with the 
Russian government. There were never two more 
oddly assorted yoke-mates than republican, intellectual 
France, and autocratic, illiterate Russia. Whatever 
way you look at it, Russia is the most backward power 
of Europe, industrially, educationally and politically. 
A great deal of nonsense has been published in France 
lately, the purpose of which is to eulogize the Rus- 
sians and to paint in bright colors the drab reality. 
Attention has been called to Russian art, music, litera- 
ture. But this is simply to magnify the exceptional. 
Every one admits that Muscovite culture has pro- 
duced a few rare flowers, just as every one admits 
that potentially the Russian civilization has admirable 
aspects, realizable after it has emerged from medieval- 
ism. The typical Russia of today, however, is not a 
few revolutionists, nor a handful of intellectuals 
excoriating their government. The typical Russia is 
the secret police, the superstitious millions, the military 
despotism, the Siberia of exile, the grave of a dozen 
nationalities, and the gehenna of the Jews. That is 
Russia as the whole world knows it, and no amount of 
sentiment or whitewash can hide the truth. The whole 

n 



FRANCE 



world knows, too, that Russia changes, and can change, 
very slowly. 

Yet into the arms of this cruel and unscrupulous 
bureaucracy France threw herself unreservedly. She 
formed with the Bear of the North a binding military 
alliance which has brought her, at the last, to the 
supreme ordeal and sacrifice she now undergoes. Her 
motive could not have been fear. A France pacific in 
aim, and unallied with great military powers, would 
have been no more the object of suspicion, or the 
victim of aggressive designs, than would Switzerland. 
Germany would not have molested a non-militarist 
France, for Germany had defeated France thoroughly, 
and extirpated French influence from her internal 
politics. There's the rub! Germany had defeated 
France in 1870-71. She had humbled France as she 
had never been humbled before. She had taken 
Alsace-Lorraine, borderland provinces, neither exactly 
French nor exactly German, as the visible badge of 
her triumph. Formerly these two provinces belonged 
to the German empire, and were taken in the midst of 
peaceful conditions without even a show of right. 
Lorraine became French, but Alsace remained Ger- 
man with the exception of a small district on the 
southern frontier. 

France formed the alliance with Russia when sting- 
ing from the bitterness of that defeat of 1870 — 71. 
Russia afforded the hope of an ultimate revenge. Rus- 
sia was courted, flattered, financed. French gold 
bought Russian securities in such quantities that the 

73 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

whole of thrifty France came to have an economic 
interest in maintaining the poHtical mesalliance. 

Bismarck said that France would never forgive 
Germany her victories. Apparently he spoke the 
truth. France fights to restore Alsace-Lorraine. Yet 
is it because the inhabitants of that territory have been 
oppressed? You will complain that when your troops 
entered Alsace at the beginning of the war they were 
treated to poisoned wells and were shot in the back 
by the peasants. The Alsatians are among the bravest 
and most loyal of German soldiers, — these Alsatians 
you wanted to "liberate." You fight to recover 
provinces which do not want to be recovered — for the 
final glory of France. La Revanche! Yet after all is 
not revenge a very human motive? 

Yes, revenge is very human, but it can hardly serve 
as an excuse for dragging the West into a war over 
the Balkans, and for decimating the whole of Europe. 
Revenge is supposed to be more the attribute of the 
Red Indian than of the civilized modern. Why should 
France alone be incapable of forgetting a past defeat? 
Why should she cherish the spark of hatred for more 
than a generation, waiting the hour to blow it into 
flame? The alignment in this war shows how many 
hatreds, how many revenges, have been foregone. 
Russia fights by the side of England and Japan: she 
forgets Crimea and the Yalu. Germany and Austria, 
once enemies, are not merely allies, they are a single 
unit of military administration. Italy was a member 
of the Triple Alliance (although no one can recall the 

74 



FRANCE 



i fact without shame) . Bulgaria linked with Turkey,— 

f who would have thought it possible? You, France, 
you alone, pursued a policy of historic revenge. You 
alone found a wounded pride too sore for healing. For 
forty years the black ribbons of mourning fluttered 
from the statue of Strassburg. You have taken them 
off now,— to place them on a million graves. 

But you did not want war, you are protesting. The 
mass of the French people were pacific. That must 
be admitted. But the mass of people in no country 
wanted war. The Germans did not want it ; the Eng- 
lish did not want it ; the Russians knew nothing about 
it. Yet they all accepted it after it came; and now 
they give their lives gladly for their country. Oddly 
enough the very fact that the present war was made 
by governments rallies support to those governments, 
and enlists the loyalty of the peoples. You can see in 
your own nation how the paradox works. The French, 
you say, generally scorned war, — Cest trop bete, la 
guerre. Therefore when the war came they were 
convinced that it was not of their own making. It 
must be some one's fault. And whose but the enemy's? 
It must have been the vile Germans, the contemptible 
Boche, who brought this about. In war-time we com- 

^'^pletely forget the Biblical injunction about the beam 

^/in our own eye. 

^ Yet after all the French people must be held re- 
sponsible for the actions of their government. Possibly 
many of you did not realize where the alliance with 
Russia and the policy of colonial expansion would 

75 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

ultimately lead you. You may have been hypnotized 
by the banner of La Revanche and the call of La 
Gloire. But you have a republican government; you 
are a democracy. There has been in France for a 
generation a strong war party. In the last decade 
or two, through all the kaleidoscopic changes of your 
politics, it has been apparent that this party of 
"aggressive patriotism" was gaining strength, gather- 
ing power. This effected the entente with England. 
It engineered the adventure in Algeria, and later man- 
aged the strangulation of Morocco. It maintained a 
strong financial interest in the blood-stained conces- 
sionaire system in the French and Belgian Congo. It 
constantly worked to embitter Anglo-German relations, 
— an effort ably abetted by the imperialist party in 
Britain. It undermined every attempt to achieve a 
reconciliation between France and Germany, and it 
brought about the ruin of Caillaux. In other words, 
the Colonial party, the Chauvinist party, was con- 
tinuously successful in its designs. Although some of 
the most patriotic and far-sighted statesmen in France 
never ceased to combat it and the interests it repre- 
sented, they were not able to break its grip. You had, 
indeed, a popular test of its power just previous to the 
outbreak of the war, in the elections on the Three 
Year Law. The Three Year Law was sustained. The 
militarists had won. The "New France," the France 
of aggressive temper, of nationalistic bombast, had 
been approved. 

There was, I submit, a discernible downward trend 

76 



FRANCE 

in the policies of the successive governments under 
the Third Republic, and to some extent a decay in 
French sentiment. There have been times when France 
stood for liberty, equality and fraternity, and was 
ready to make great sacrifices for unselfish ends. But 
the France which battles to recover Alsace-Lorraine 
and to enthrone the Russian Czar in Constantinople, 
has drifted a long way from the ideals of the Revo- 
lution ; just as the England of Grey and Asquith is far 
different from the England of Cobden, Bright and 
Palmerston. Indeed this war could not have happened 
had there not been a distinct deterioration in the tone 
of European politics. All sentiment was squeezed out 
of international relations, and along with it most of the 
principle. One indication was the support given by 
the Liberal West to the Russian bureaucracy, at a time 
when that bureaucracy was menaced by Liberal revolt 
at home. Another proof was the cynical abandonment 
of the weaker nations and the colored races. Morocco, 
the Congo, Finland, Persia, the Balkans! These out- 
rages never would have been tolerated by any Euro- 
pean civilization that was not preoccupied with selfish 
and sinister plots and counterplots. Things are now 
at such a pass that you are able to laud in the most 
fulsome terms an Italy which bargains away its honor, 
enters upon a career of national piracy, and attacks 
its own allies in their hour of supreme peril. There 
has been a debacle in morals. 

This "New France" is the worst France since the 
seventies, since the France of Paul Deroulede. You 

n 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

have revived that old lust for military glory which 
France, through all her history, has never been able 
quite to uproot. That is the heart of the matter. It 
will not do to picture yourselves as the good white 
knight forced to buckle on armor to meet the "Prus- 
sian menace." The obvious historical facts disprove 
the assertion. There has never been for you a Prus- 
sian menace. In the last forty years you, a people 
with a rapidly falling birth-rate and not essentially 
commercial, entered on a policy of colonial expansion. 
Germany, with more right, did the same thing. But 
you succeeded in acquiring territory while she, 
relatively, failed. But has she ever balked you in your 
enterprises? Quite the contrary. The spurs of the 
French chanticleer proved sharper and more annoying 
than the beak of the German eagle. Remember 
Morocco! In all those forty years the Mailed Fist 
was not once lifted against you. It would not have 
struck now had you not challenged the very existence 
of Germany by the alliances with Russia and England. 
What a masterly stroke of statecraft it was, this plac- 
ing of Germany in a military vise ! Your leaders could 
not resist that temptation. They saw a France re- 
juvenated, reborn, triumphant! And the soul of the 
French rose to the vision. 

Well, you have the glory already, though not the 
victory. No one of the Allies has made so splendid a 
showing of military prowess and vigor. But at what 
a cost in lives and human agony! No nation ever 
bought its laurels more dearly. And who can tell 

78 



FRANCE 

what sacrifices you may yet be called upon to make? 
How idle it is, after all, to reproach the French ! You 
are intoxicated; the madness is in your blood. It is 
too late to turn back now; you must see this through 
to the bitter end. Yet the whole world grieves for you, 
because the whole world loves you. It loves you not 
for your ambitions or your bellicose moods, but for 
the wholesome sanity of your life in times of peace, 
for your gaiety and wit, because of your intellectual 
and artistic brilliance, because you are, in a word, the 
most Greek of modern nations. Americans especially 
hold you dear, for they have not forgotten those flashes 
of sympathy you have shown for the ideals which 
America, in a blundering way, is trying to realize. 
We see you now as the most pitiable figure in this 
world war, because you suffer so much and with the 
least need. Our sympathy is not less because you 
have, for the moment, turned your back on the great 
ideals of human progress. You are like a beautiful 
woman we have loved and who has betrayed our 
loyalty, and we look on you and think, how can you 
prove so false and be so fair. The fact that you suffer 
for your own sins as well as for the sins of others only 
makes the heartbreak heavier. Like France herself 
we bow our heads to mourn your irrevocable dead and 
unreturning brave. 



79 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

AN able American historian predicted at the begin- 
ning of this war that the United States would 
be pro-German in its sympathies within four months. 
He gave two reasons. The first was that the Ameri- 
can mind would puncture the lid of lies which Euro- 
pean diplomats had clamped over the explosion in 
July, 1914, and would begin to understand the real 
position in which Germany found herself. You see 
he was a philosophical historian. His second reason 
was that the German- Americans would argue the rest 
of us around to their point of view. 

It is superfluous to say that the historian was mis- 
taken. Not four months, but four times four months, 
have passed, and the United States is far from pro- 
German. Our pro-Ally contingent, most conspicuous 
in Boston and New York, is as violent as ever, both 
in its opinions and the expression of them. There 
exists, indeed, a very active and powerful element 
which is working — covertly for the most part — to in- 
volve the United States in a war with the Central 
Powers. The German-Americans have not argued us 
around. If they started out with such intention they 
have failed. Their protestations may have had some 
effect, but they themselves have been ridiculed, scolded, 

80 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

browbeaten, sneered at. To designate German-Amer- 
icans, together with their friends the Irish-Americans 
and the Austrian-Americans, a new term of reproach 
has been invented, "hyphenates." 

II 

The German-Americans have been cruelly misrepre- 
sented. There is no sounder or more desirable element 
in our population than our Teutonic blood. There is 
no element which has displayed devotion to the coun- 
try, or civic or private virtue, in greater degree. Yet 
in these months of war they have been forced into a 
most distressing position. They have daily read in the 
press the grossest insults to themselves and to the 
land of their ancestors. They constantly see the news 
poisoned by calumny and abuse. They live in a coun- 
try which has declared its neutrality but which sup- 
plies in tremendous quantities the arms and ammuni- 
tion to kill their kin, and they are powerless to hinder.- 
When they have raised their voices in protest, their 
patriotism has been questioned. It is impossible to 
gauge the irritation, pain and humiliation they have 
suffered. Nevertheless it has sometimes struck me as 
odd that they have not made more headway against 
American prejudice. For they have been almost the 
sole champions of Germany's cause in America, and 
they have had a strong logical case to argue. And yet 
Americans, in the mass, have not been brought to see 
the validity of Germany's major contentions. 

For one thing, German-Americans have not always 
been happy in their defense of Germany. They have 

81 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

sometimes used phrases to the detriment of facts. For 
example, in seeking to combat American misconcep- 
tions, some of them have asserted that Germany is 
"democratic" and that Germans enjoy "personal lib- 
erty." Now, to speak plainly, neither of these state- 
ments is true except in a qualified measure. No gov- 
ernment which maintains such rigid property qualifi- 
cations on voting as does Prussia, and which gives 
such large powers to a hereditary ruler, is democratic 
in the Anglo-Saxon sense. People who live under such 
a multitude of police regulations as do the Germans 
have not personal liberty in the American sense. Ger- 
man civilization shows many lofty virtues which other 
peoples envy and have not attained ; but it is different 
from ours. These things have nothing to do with the 
case anyway. It is not our business to tell the Ger- 
mans, who are free, enlightened, educated, what sort 
of government they shall prefer, any more than it is 
our business to tell the Chinese whether they shall 
have a republic or a monarchy. Americans, after all, 
are not so provincial as to want every nation cut from 
the same pattern, — least of all their own pattern. 

And also, there is Mr. Wilson ! 

German-Americans have been censured for attack- 
ing President Wilson's foreign policy. This, of course, 
is unjust. The very persons who objected when Ger- 
man-Americans criticised the President for going too 
far, are now belaboring the President for not going 
far enough ! But have German- American criticisms 
always been well directed? What, precisely, is the 

82 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

complaint they have to make against the administra- 
tion's course? 

In general, the accusation is this : that the United 
States has been more neutral in name than in fact; 
that our neutrality has been highly prejudicial to Ger- 
many and highly benevolent to the Allies. The citizens 
of Germany and Austria, apparently, are convinced 
of this; they do not think this country gives them a 
square deal. Some Englishmen are candid enough to 
admit the same thing. G. Bernard Shaw recently said : 
"I may, however, remark, that America is not neutral. [ 
She is taking a very active part in the war by supplying 
us with ammunition and weapons and other munitions. 
Neutrality is nonsense." Quite as emphatic is Norman 
Angell : "Indeed, if we go below diplomatic fictions 
to positive realities, America is decisively intervening^ 
in the war; she is perhaps settling its issue by throw- 
ing the weight of her resources in money, supplies and 
ammunition on the side of one combatant against the 
other. The American government has without doubt 
scrupulously respected all the rules of neutrality. But 
it would have been equally neutral for America to have 
decided that her national interests compelled her to 
exercise her sovereign rights in keeping her resources 
at home at this juncture and to have treated combatants 
exactly alike by exporting to neither. This form of 
neutrality — just as legally defensible in the opinion of 
many competent American judges as the present one — 
would perhaps have altered the whole later history of 
the war. I am not giving you my own opinion, but 

83 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

that o£ very responsible independent American authori- 
ties, when I say that had American opinion been as 
hostile to the Allies as on the whole it has been to 
Germany, the campaign for an embargo on the export 
of arms or the raising of a loan would have been 
irresistible. You see I am speaking with undiplomatic 
freedom ; saying out loud what everybody thinks." 

The foregoing view, it seems to me, is unquestionably 
sound. The United States supplies munitions to the 
Allies not in normal quantities, but to the value of 
billions of dollars. Our plants are run to their full 
capacity ; extensions are built ; whole new factories are 
erected. War orders dominate for the moment our 
economic life. And all these supplies go to the enemies 
of Germany. We cannot expect a German to be much 
impressed by American preachments on "humanity" 
and "justice" when his sons have been shot by Ameri- 
can bullets. And what galls the native German almost 
as much, I suspect, as the shipments of arms, which he 
knows to be technically legal, is the supine attitude of 
America toward Great Britain. We are not holding 
the balance even. British violations of neutral rights^ 
are, from the standpoint of international law, more 
reprehensible than Germany's submarine warfare, 
which was a policy of reprisal. Britain has killed our 
trade with Germany in noncontraband goods, although 
not maintaining even the semblance of a blockade of 
German ports ; she has forbidden our trade with even 



^See Economic Aspects of the War by Edwin J. Clapp, New Haven, 
1915. 

84 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

neutral countries of Europe (while actively trading 
with those countries herself) ; she has stopped Ameri- 
can vessels and taken off citizens; she has seized the 
mails of the United States. These arrogant violations 
of our rights are not merely technical ; they are calcu- 
lated to do the greatest possible amount of harm to the 
Central Powers; they were initiated frankly for the 
double purpose of starving Germany's population, and 
of effecting Germany's economic ruin. Neutrals be 
hanged ; Britannia rules the waves ! 

What has the United States done to stop these 
wrongs? Obviously, nothing effective. Each new 
"blockade" order is more offensive than the last. It is 
illuminating to contrast the mild and polite protests of 
this government to England with the sharp, menacing 
language used to Germany. Whenever we have ad- 
dressed ourselves to England or France we have said' 
in effect : "My dear fellow, can't you see that you are 
in the wrong?" Whenever we have addressed our- 
selves to Germany or Austria we have said in effect: 
"You contemptible ruffian, quit that instantly!" We 
have used threats with Germany, persuasion with Eng- 
land. The result is that Germany has granted our de- 
mands, while England has grown more arrogant. 

The United States, in order to make its neutrality 
one of fact and not of pretensions, must do one or the 
other of two things : must place an embargo on the 
export of arms, or break the British blockade. Per- 
haps the latter alternative is the more feasible. Un- 
questionably an embargo on munitions should have 

85 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

been undertaken at the beginning of the war, for both 
neutral and humanitarian reasons. But now, a year 
and a half later, it is possibly too late. Yet this swol- 
len industry and these tremendous shipments of the 
instruments of death cannot be ignored. They over- 
shadow every other relation of America to the strug- 
gle. They constitute us in fact an ally of the Allies. 
If they may not now be stopped, they lay on us the 
sternest obligation to make England toe the mark. 
That can be done; a serious threat of an embargo 
would help the British lion to see a gleam of reason. 
And unless we do this we may entirely forfeit the re- 
spect and friendship of the Central Powers, — a 
friendship we can ill afford to lose. 

German-Americans, it seems to me, have wasted too 
much verbal shot and shell on President Wilson. After 
all Mr. Wilson has kept us out of the fray. It is not 
hard to think of other prominent Americans who, in 
his place, would have embroiled us long ago! There 
are many of us who do not like Mr. Wilson's diplo- 
matic methods ; they verge too much on a policy of 
drift. But we prefer them to bellicose methods. The 
power of the President, moreover, has its limits. Con- 
gress has the authority to place an embargo on the 
export of arms; the Senate has the final word in for- 
eign relations. German-Americans should work 
toward two ends, I think, — first, to make our neutral-/ 
ity genuine and impartial, and second and more im- 
portant, to keep America out of the war. That danger 
has by no means passed. To accomplish these ends 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

they should concentrate on American opinion, try to 
squeeze out of it unfairness, rancor and intolerance. 
Already they have accomplished something in this 
direction. The tone of American opinion has im- 
proved since the start of the war. But there still 
remains much ground to be plowed. 

Ill 

The people of the United States have escaped the 
war fever, although persistent attempts are made to 
arouse them to a fighting mood. Beyond cavil the 
citizens of this country are bent on peace. 

Rudyard Kipling, whose occupation these days is 
to out-Junker the Junkers, has proposed the pleasant 
little toast: "Damn all neutrals!" Undoubtedly Mr. 
Kipling cocked a baleful eye at the United States when 
he uttered this. We could afford to smile at Mr. Kip- 
ling's spleen if he stood alone. But within the last 
year many militant non-combatants among the Allies 
have cast baleful glances at the United States. The 
indifference of America offends them as deeply, ap- 
parently, as the hatred of their enemy. Why, they 
ask with a gesture of impatience, should Americans 
stand aside in this crisis of a civilization ? Why should 
they allow others to fight their battle for them — the 
battle of liberty and democracy? And these critics 
of ours in England and France are none too delicate 
in attributing motives for this Yankee apathy toward 
their noble cause. They insinuate we are too busy 
making dollars out of others' distress to heed the call 

87 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

of the spirit, and they frankly hint that when we say 
we are too proud to fight we mean too cowardly. 

A number of Britons have recently unburdened 
themselves on this subject of American neutrality.^ 
Let me quote a few of the choicer passages : 

"We fight not merely for our threatened selves; we 
fight for the liberty and peace of the whole world. We 
fight, and you Americans know we fight, for you. War 
is a tragic and terrible business, and those who will 
not face the blood and dust of it must be content to 
play only the most secondary of parts in the day of 
reckoning. H. G. Wells." 

"On the last question, however, — the future of 
America in face of a German triumph — I can speak, 
if not with authority, at least with certainty. There 
is simply no doubt in the world that a German power 
founded on the breaking of France and England would 
have ultimately to break America, too, before its work 
was secure. A rich and disdainful democracy across 
the Atlantic is something which the German Empire 
simply could not afford to tolerate. If Germany gets 
as far as that, it would be vain to discuss whether 
America should fight, because America certainly will; 
and in that fight, please God, she would have Burgoyne 
beside her as well as Lafayette. 

G. K. Chesterton.'" 

"The British nation would certainly be much grati- 
fied if their kinsmen, the Americans, should take a 

''Everybody's Magazine, January, 1916. 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

hand in suppressing the 'mad bull of Europe.' Eng- 
land would certainly be greatly benefited if America 
should go to war with Germany. Sir Roper Parking- 
ton, M. P., in a recent speech, said: 'If the Amer- 
icans should join the Allies, the war would soon be 
ended.' Sir Hiram Maxim." 

"Personally, I have always held that America would 
come to England's assistance if ever England was 
hard pressed. Great Britain as yet is not, thank God, 
in a hole. Still, it has puzzled me not a little during 
the past year to assign a good cause for America re- 
maining neutral in this awful contest. Is not America, 
just as much as Great Britain, a lover of justice and 
a hater of such atrocities as those which have char- 
acterized the warfare of the Huns? And as a friend 
she can no longer stand aloof and see civilization, and 
all that great nations are bound to uphold and hold 
dear, crushed and trampled under foot by barbarism 
and 'f rightfulness.' I am quite convinced that it is 
the unanimous opinion throughout Great Britain that 
America should join the Allies, and it is undoubtedly 
a fixed hope in this country that she will assuredly 
do so before many months have passed. 

General Garnet Wolseley." 

These gentlemen take their malice and themselves 
very seriously. But they have, as it seems to me, 
totally misjudged the trend of American opinion since 
the outbreak of hostilities. They do not see that 
Americans — outside of the Anglomaniacs, found 

89 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

chiefly along the Atlantic seaboard — passionately de- 
sire peace because they have come to believe that peace 
serves not only the best interests of themselves but of 
civilization itself. The Middle West, the West, and 
the South, do not want war, will not have war. Even 
in the hypnotized East there is a great sober element 
which would regard a plunge into this welter of slaugh- 
ter as the worst possible calamity to the Republic. 
Only the pro- Ally fanatics (who are the most dan- 
gerous hyphenates we harbor, as I shall attempt to 
point out in a moment) want war and work for war. 
Americans, in other words, have traveled far from 
that naive partisanship for the Allies which charac- 
terized them eighteen months ago. What has wrought 
this change in sentiment? Chiefly the growth of a 
healthy cynicism. I am speaking now of the bulk of 
Americans, who lie in opinion between the red-hot 
pro-Germans on the one extreme and the red-hot pro- 
Ally sympathizers on the other extreme. This great 
sane mass of the nation has disallowed the high- 
sounding declarations, the grandiose pretentions, of 
either side. It has come to some very definite con- 
clusions; it believes that this war was willed by gov- 
ernments, not by peoples ; that it sprang directly from 
a system of diplomatic groups and military alliances, 
each of which was trying constantly to tilt or upset 
the balance of power in its own favor; that the only 
significant rivalries behind the mutual hostilities were 
imperialistic rivalries; that the real stakes in this war 
are colonies, trade pre-emptions, strategic ports and i' 

90 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 



straits, and above all, military prestige ; that militarism 
may be indicated by a predominant navy as well as by 
a great army, and that its essence is neither, but an itch 
for power and a muddle of selfish national ambitions ; 
that militarism is not exclusively or even principally 
a Prussian disease, but a European, indeed, a world 
disease; that despite all the fine phrases about free- 
dom, justice and democracy, the real danger to civiliza- 
tion lies in the war itself and in its spread : that a war 
of imperialistic rivalries enlists the support of great 
populations by cant and by lies about the enemy; and 
that as the struggle grows in bitterness and in extent 
of bereavement, both sides — but especially the losing 
side — become fanatic in hatred of the foe. 

In brief, Americans refuse to be impressed longer 
by sham and pose. They are inclined to agree with 
Francis Delaisi, who predicted in 1911 that the busi- 
ness magnates and the politicians were about to plunge 
Europe into an imperialistic struggle.^ They are in- 
clined to agree with Bernard Shaw, who asserted early 
in the conflict: "All attempts to represent this war as 
anything higher or more significant philosophically or 
politically or religiously for our Junkers and our 
Tommies than a quite primitive contest of the pug- 
nacity that bullies and the pugnacity that will not be 
bullied are foredoomed to the derision of history."! 
Bryan voiced American sentiment when he called it a 
"causeless war." Of course the phrase is inaccurate; 



^The Inevitable War {La guerre qui vient), by Francis Delaisi. Paris, 
1911; Boston, 1915. 

91 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

there were causes enough, such as they were. Rather 
it should be called a witless war. 

Another reason why most Americans cannot share 
the views of the solemn Englishmen above quoted is 
that Americans have not given way to hatred of Ger- 
mans. We regard them as human beings much like 
other men and women, not as "Huns," "savages" and 
"beasts." The American does not have the Briton's 
naive belief in German atrocities. He knows that 
many of these tales (such as that of the Belgian child 
with severed hands) have been disproved a hundred 
times. He hears quite as frightful reports of Rus- 
sian atrocities and of French outrages. He under- 
stands that war is a gruesome business and that it 
brings out some of the basest traits in human nature; 
but he is unwilling to heap all the abuse due to human 
nature at its worst on Teutonic nature. Not only does 
the American show a wholesome skepticism toward 
the atrocity yarns paraded by the Allied govern- 
ments ; he goes further ; he feels a revulsion of disgust. 
He wonders why men who are gentlemen attack the 
reputations as well as the soldiers of their foes, and 
keep up a campaign of calumniation which they know 
in part at least to be false, a campaign at once mali- 
cious and mendacious. 

Still another reason why the American feels kindlier 
toward Germany is that he has a high respect for 
German civilization, in times of peace at any rate. 
The British upper classes seem always to have re- 
garded Germans with the contempt that the estab- 

92 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

lished feel toward the nouveau riche. They are unap- 
preciative of German poetry, art and Hterature; they 
speak of boors and canaille ; they appear to have gath- 
ered their estimate of the German nation by watching 
a fat Berliner eat sauerkraut in a beer-garden. The 
American on the other hand gives German civiliza- 
tion its due, even though he be one who deplores its 
"militarism." He knows that German music and Ger- 
man science lead the world; he admires the Germans 
for their educational system, for their municipalities, 
for their social insurance. Englishmen have often 
commented on the paucity of learning in America, and 
compared our culture unfavorably with their own; 
and perhaps in general the boast is justified. But in 
their ignorance of the real Germany and of German 
cultural attainments the English upper classes have 
shown themselves to be precisely what Matthew Arnold 
called them — "barbarians." 

Our British critics should remember that Americans 
are fully competent to judge for themselves what the 
effect of a German victory would be on the United 
States. We are not affrighted over hypothetical Ger- 
man schemes. We know perfectly well that a German 
victory would not lead to the "enslavement" of either 
England or of France, and we are not worried about 
the fate of Suez or of India. We do not forget, again, 
that a German defeat means not only the triumph of 
British imperialism, but the triumph of Russia and 
Japan. We would rather see the Balkan peoples, or 
the races of the Near East, Prussianized than Russian- 

93 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

ized. And most vividly of all, Americans realize that 
the trend of world politics after the war is a matter 
of sheer speculation. It is all guesswork; no one 
knows. The dread designs which the British attribute 
to the German government are deduced from enmity 
and malice, not from reason or clearheaded calcula- 
tion, America's answer to all this alarmist talk is mili- 
tary and naval preparedness ; we shall be ready to meet 
aggression, from whatever quarter! So far as South 
America is concerned, Englishmen would do well to 
ponder a bit the pregnant remark of Israel Zangwill : 
"But the Monroe Doctrine would lose its last vestige 
of meaning if America intervened in a European 
war." 

The American people have come to the conclusion 
that peace is their duty. This is not from fear, greed 
or sluggishness. We are not ultra-pacifists in this 
country ; we do not want peace at any price, especially 
at the price of honor. But that is just the point: we '. 
are not convinced that any great moral principle, or I 
even any fundamental issue of nationality, is at stake 
in this conflict. As the strife in Europe grows more 
desperate, as the non-combatant populations show a 
more revengeful and hateful temper, the war seems 
more and more remote (except to the Anglomaniacs) 
from American interests. After all, why should Amer- 
ica feed her sons to this carnage by the thousands, or 
the hundreds of thousands? Why should boys from 
the farms of Ohio, Kansas and Texas die to help 
France take Alsace-Lorraine, or the Romanoffs to vic- 

94 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

timize more peoples ? What have we to gain by becom- 
ing, for the first time in our history, entangled in mur- 
derous European rivalries? Why should we abandon 
our one opportunity of service, that, as President Wil- 
son has expressed it, of keeping the "processes of 
peace alive, if only to prevent collective economic 
ruin" ? 

At the start the mass of Americans felt both an 
intense loyalty to the cause of the Allies, and a grip- 
ping horror at the catastrophe to Europe. Both of 
these feelings have to some extent weakened. The 
intellectual classes are not now so much concerned 
over the military outcome as over the prospective 
terms of settlement. They hope that both sides will 
act with a measure of magnanimity and restraint which 
will give some basis for a permanent peace. By the 
common man, by the man in the street, the war is 
now regarded with indifference, indeed, with bore- 
dom. Our vast American irreverence has asserted 
itself, even in the face of the most awful battle of 
history. In many places "war talk" is tabooed, con- 
sidered bad form. The majority of Americans, prob- 
ably, still hope to see the Allies win ; but their interest 
is sentimental rather than vital. It is not the breathless 
solicitude of one who watches his champion do battle 
to save him ; it is rather the enthusiasm of the baseball 
"fan" who cheers for the home team. At the begin- 
ning of the war the favorite American quip was: 
"I'm neutral; I don't care who beats Germany." At 
present Americans are so neutral they are reconciled 

95 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

to the prospect of seeing Germany win, if she can 
muster the strength. This growth of indifference may 
gall Englishmen, Frenchmen and American Tories. 
But it is, I submit, a patent fact. 

IV 

There is a conspicuous element in America which 
has persistently refused to see this war through Amer- 
ican eyes. When these persons look at contemporary 
history they look at it from the point of view of Eng- 
lishmen and Frenchmen; when they urge action they 
urge it in the interest of the European coalition to 
which England and France belong. They are our pro- 
Ally fanatics, our Anglomaniacs, our American Tories. 
By whatever name they may be called, they have one 
distinguishing mark : they make mock of our neutral- 
ity. 

August 18, 1914, before the war was a month old, 
President Wilson issued an appeal for restraint in 
discussing the conflict. The President said in part : 

"The effect of the war upon the United States will 
depend upon what American citizens say or do. Every 
man who really loves America will act and speak in 
the true spirit of neutrality, which is the spirit of 
impartiality and fairness and friendliness to all con- 
cerned. 

"The people of the United States are drawn from 
many nations, and chiefly from the nations now at 
war. It is natural and inevitable that there should be 
the utmost variety of sympathy and desire among them 

96 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

with regard to the issues and circumstances of the 
conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, 
to succeed in this momentous struggle. It will be easy 
to excite passion and difficult to allay it. Those 
responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy respon- 
sibility. 

"I venture, therefore, my countrymen, to speak a 
solemn word of warning against that deepest, most 
subtle, most essential breach of neutrality which may 
spring out of partisanship, out of passionately taking 
sides. 

"I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest wish and 
purpose of every thoughtful American that this great 
country of ours, which is, of course, the first in our 
thoughts and hearts, should show herself in this tone 
of peculiar trial a nation fit beyond others to exhibit 
the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the dignity of 
self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action, a 
nation which neither sits in judgment upon others nor 
is disturbed in her own counsels and which keeps her- 
self fit and free to do what is honest and disinter- 
ested and truly serviceable for the peace of the world." 

From the beginning pro-Ally sympathizers have 
spit upon the President's words. They have passion- 
ately taken sides. They have put no bridle on their 
tongues; they have poured out the vilest vituperation 
on Germany. With asinine self-complacency they 
have "sat in judgment" on the nations at war, and 
delivered the "American verdict." Although finding 
themselves largely in control of the press, they have 

97 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

never tried to speak impartially, never attempted to 
allay passion. On the contrary, they have done their 
embittered best to lash America to intolerance and 
hysteria. 

Since the torpedoing of the Lusitania this unneutral 

element has tried to rush us into war over our "rights." 

, And this despite the fact that there never has been the 

slightest excuse for going to war over that issue. On 

the whole, neither side has offered us direct offense. 

We have simply been caught between the firing lines. 

It is impossible to vindicate neutral rights by fighting 

one side, for both sides have infringed those rights. 

Should we war on Germany we should fight by the 

side of allies whose interpretation of sea law is no more 

acceptable to us than that of our foes. Indeed, a sea 

monopolized and fortified by Great Britain may in 

I the end prove more disturbing to us than the subma- 

1 rine indiscretions of Germany and Austria. 

Of course pro-Ally sympathizers insist that Ger- 
many's invasion of neutral rights have cost American 
lives, whereas England's violations result in merely 
commercial and economic damage. The distinction 
I is hypocritical. The persons who work themselves 
into a rage over Germany's "slaughter of innocent 
women and children" are not in the least annoyed be- 
cause German babies are going to die for lack of 
milk. England's violations of our rights have been 
less spectacular than Germany's ; but they are far more 
insolent. And it is well to remember that the Fathers 
fought the Revolution over a stamp-tax. The present 

98 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

administration has vindicated the right of Americans 
to sail through war zones on ships of belHgerent na- 
tions (although in Mexico it warned Americans to 
leave or remain at their own risk). But it has not 
vindicated the right of Americans to use the high seas 
for legitimate commerce. Senator Gore summed up 
the matter in a sentence : "It is quite as important to 
protect the right of Americans to ship innocent goods 
as it is to protect their right to risk involving this 
country in a carnival of slaughter." 

The submarine controversy has dragged itself out 
month after month. At each halt in the negotiations 
our traitorous Anglomaniacs have rejoiced. They have 
implored the President to stickle for every little point 
of international law. They have insisted on a policy 
designed, not to vindicate our rights, but to sever rela- 
tions. They are insatiate ; no concession satisfies them. 
Germany declares that she has no intention of molest- 
ing neutral ships and neutral commerce; then she 
yields unconditionally to the demand that unarmed 
merchantmen, under hostile flag, must not be torpedoed 
without warning and without adequate provision for 
the safety of passengers and crew. Does this impair- 
ment of the submarine weapon placate the Anglo- 
maniacs ? Not at all ; they now insist that Germany and 
Austria must forbear to treat armed merchantmen as 
auxiliary cruisers. It is not enough that Americans 
may travel safely on American, Dutch and Scandi- 
navian ships ; not enough that they may travel without 
fear on unarmed British, French, Italian and Japanese 

99 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

ships. They must also be granted the right to travel 
J without danger on belHgerent vessels carrying arma- 
ment hypocritically called "defensive." Sensible 
Americans, in and out of Congress, rightly urge that 
American citizens be warned to stay off armed bel- 
ligerent vessels. But our frenzied Tories scream that 
American honor is at stake. Honor? Great Britain 
during the Russo-Japanese war, and Sweden during 

- the present war, warned their citizens not to travel on 
armed belligerent ships save at their own risk. Did 
England and Sweden thereby lose their national honor ? 
In her attitude toward so-called defensive armament, 

I Germany has the equity on her side, whatever the let- 
ter of the law may be. This is a trifling "right" for 
us to cherish ; and to endanger our peace for it would 
be childish. Its defense can seem important only to 
those whose minds hold a hinterland of anti-German 
hate. 

In the name of honesty, what more can these Ameri- 
ican Tories demand of the United States? Has our 
neutrality been interpreted in any way which has 
given aid or succor to the Teutonic Powers? Have 
we not by our huge shipments of arms virtually con- 
stituted ourselves an ally of the Entente? The unvar- 
nished truth is this : the pro- Ally fanatics in this coun- 
try are not thinking of American interests at all ; they 
are thinking of British and French interests. They 
ask us to intervene in a European struggle because of 
their opinion of the European right and wrong of it. 
They want us to go to war despite the fact that our 

100 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

I youth would be killed and our wealth destroyed in 
I a quarrel which is no concern of the American people. 
They demand war notwithstanding that it would im- 
peril our international relations for a century. They 
urge us to fight, knowing full well that in our opin- 
ions we are a divided people, and that war would blast 
our national unity and run a cleavage of rancor and 
hatred through our cosmopolitan population. 

These Anglomaniacs usually disguise their intentions 
in a fog of fine words. Sometimes they are more can- 
did. In New York City there is an organization de- 
nominating itself The American Rights Committee. 
This committee has issued a statement which reads : 

"Seventeen months of the European war have 
passed. During this period events of profound sig- 
nificance have occurred and issues formerly obscure 
have become clearly defined. The brutal violation of 
Belgian neutrality has been followed by the bombard- 
ment of unfortified places, the deliberate killing of 
non-combatants, the murder of women and children 
on land and sea, the wholesale massacre of the Ar- 
menian people, the disclosure of gigantic purposes of 
world-conquest, and a general defense of these un- 
speakable deeds by the Teutonic peoples. 

"Our eyes have been opened to facts which were 
not fully revealed when we adopted a policy of neu- 
trality, and the situation which confronts us today is 
not that which confronted us in August, 1914. Then 
we were admonished to remain neutral toward the 
European crisis: today we are involved in a world- 

101 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

crisis. Then we followed the traditional American 
policy of non-interference in European political strug- 
gles : today we are called upon to champion the im- 
mutable and universal rights of man. Then we tried 
to maintain neutrality of thought as well as of word 
and deed : today the Teutonic Allies have forced upon 
us issues which render neutrality not merely impossible 
but utterly repugnant to the moral conscience of the 
nation. Through our fuller knowledge of the events 
which precipitated the war, of the manner in which 
it has been prosecuted by the Teutonic Allies, and of 
the enormous schemes for Teutonic aggrandizement, 
we have come to understand that a theory and method 
of government which we abhor is being forced upon 
the world by military might, and that all those human 
liberties which our nation was founded to maintain 
are today imperiled by the possibility of a Teutonic 
triumph." 

This bombast is followed by a "declaration of prin- 
ciples" : 

"1. We believe that there is a morality of nations 
which requires every government to observe its treaty- 
obligations and to order its conduct with a decent 
respect to the opinions of mankind. 

"2. We believe that the Teutonic Powers have re- 
pudiated the obligations of civilized nations and have 
raised issues which lift the present struggle from 
the sphere of European political disputes to a crisis 
involving all humanity. 

"3. We believe that in the face of such a world- 

102 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

crisis our people cannot remain neutral and our gov- 
ernment should not remain silent. 

"4. We condemn the aims of the Teutonic Powers, 
and we denounce as barbarous their methods of war- 
fare, 

"5. We believe that the Entente Allies are engaged 
in a struggle to prevent the domination of the world 
by armed force and are striving to guarantee to the 
smallest nation its rights to an independent and peace- 
ful existence. 

"6. We believe that the progress of civilization and 
the free development of the principles of democratic 
government depend upon the success of the Entente 
Allies. 

"7. We believe that our duty to humanity and 
respect for our national honor demand that our gov- 
ernment take appropriate action to place the nation 
on record as deeply in sympathy with the efforts of 
the Entente Allies to remove the menace of Prussian 
militarism." 

It would be a waste of time to refute these state- 
ments. They obviously are inspired by prejudice and 
ill-will; they obviously treat the crassest assumptions 
as matters of fact ; they obviously reveal a sophomoric 
conception of international politics. Nevertheless these 
agitators and their ilk constitute a menace to the peace 
and security of the United States. Preposterous as 
their utterances are, they foster malevolence, for in 
times of passion declamation passes for reason. These 
Anglomaniacs are turning their backs on America; 

103 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

they have their eyes fastened on England, Belgium 
and France, They do not heed American opinion ; they 
listen to the advice of Englishmen. They are our true 
hyphenates. They are the real traitors within our 
borders. They are the unloyal element that has intro- 
duced "corrupt distempers" into our national life. 

For these American Tories there is only one ade- 
quate piece of advice: Let them get out! Let them 
enlist and take their places in the English trenches. 
Let them remember that the seas are open to them; 
Brittania rules the waves ! Their hearts are in France 
and England; they are free to prove their sincerity 
by risking their lives there. We do not want them in 
America, fighting the war with their mouths, seeking 
to embroil the whole nation. I am aware that this 
advice cannot be followed by many of our most violent 
pro-Ally fanatics, because they are past military age. 
It is a remarkable fact that our bitterest defamers of 
Germany are old men. I shall not be invidious enough 
to mention names; but just recall to mind the leading 
American Tories! There is no more shameful spec- 
tacle in America than these malignant old men, waving 
their fists at the Kaiser, mouthing the garbage thrown 
to them from Fleet Street, hounding us on, shrilling 
for a sacrifice of American blood. 



Most thinking men and women agree that this is a 
time for America to keep her head and watch her step. 
Should the Teutonic armies continue their victories, 

104 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

and approach to a triumph, the efforts of hyphenated 
Anglo- and Franco-Americans to involve us will be- 
come more frantic. But that collective insanity we 
shall probable avoid, despite their fomentations. We 
shall do the world the negative service of standing 
aloof. But it seems doubtful that America will be 
able to accomplish anything positive for world peace, 
anything constructive for the future security of 
mankind. 

And the reason? 

Simply this: that bigotry cannot reform bigots; that 
prejudice and hatred and intolerance cannot heal a 
world gone mad with hatred and intolerance. Amer- 
ica cannot effectively fight militarism so long as she 
thinks injustice to Germany. And let there be no 
mistake about that : American opinion is monstrously 
unjust. It is as unjust to Germany now as was British 
opinion to the North during our Civil War. America 
cannot suggest sensible remedies for war so long 
as she holds to the childish notion that the blood-guilt 
of this greatest of all wars is a personal guilt of the 
German military caste or of the German people. 

Fundamentally, of course, none of the great govern- 
ments at war is blameless. We do not have here white 
angels fighting black fiends, but human beings all 
smeared with the same scarlet. The only question 
open to debate is, who is smeared the less ? This ques- 
tion finds its answer in the recent politics of Europe, 
the history, say, of the ten years preceding the war. 
To me it seems that any philosophical examination of 

105 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

this recent history gives Germany a shade of advan- 
tage, a sHghtly superior claim on our moral sympathy, 
both for the character of her aims, and her honesty 
in avowing them, 

American comment on the war appears either to 
have overshot the mark, or undershot it. It has been 
either too naive or too subtle. First of all, Americans 
made up their minds that Germany commenced the 
war ; that she was the "disturber of the world's peace." 
It was a snap judgment, for it was based almost exclu- 
sively upon the events of the twelve days of the crisis. 
The diplomatic documents of the European govern- 
ments were said to embody the "evidence in the case." 
Never was evidence flimsier. The different govern- 
ments wrote, selected and printed what they wanted the 
world to read. The dispatches are all scissors and 
paste, and sometimes not even that, but plain fabrica- 
tion, as in the instance of the notorious No. 2 in the 
French Yellow Book. The worthlessness of such 
"evidence" for unbiased judgment is shown by the 
fact that men come to exactly opposite conclusions 
in reading it. Judgment depends not on what the dis- 
patches say, but on which of them one believes true, 
and which one rejects as false. From a thorough pe- 
rusal of the White, Yellow, Orange, Gray, Blue, Red 
and Green Books, every person emerges with precisely 
that mental colorblindness with which he started. 

Americans condemned Germany at the beginning 
mainly from newspaper accounts of the crisis. That 
snap judgment has never been revised. The scholarly 

106 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

portion of American opinion has busied itself chiefly 
in explaining what it assumed to be true. It has started 
from the premise that the Teutons precipitated a 
world war, and were bitten with militarism. So it has 
attempted to give reasons for that militarism. It has 
sought to trace the influence of Nietzsche and Treit- 
schke on the Teutonic consciousness ; it has attempted 
to derive German psychology from Kant ; it has made 
elaborate and academic contrasts between the Latin 
and Teutonic civilizations, — and so on through fine- 
spun dialectics. All of this discussion is but window- 
dressing for a theory and a prejudice. 

Some thoughtful Americans, who see the war as a 
logical result of the silent, alert struggle in Europe 
between rival alliances for a balance of power, cover- 
ing many years, state a conclusion unfavorable to 
Germany in restrained language. They would agree 
with Prof. Ellery C. Stowell: "I do not wish to be 
understood as thinking that Germany really wished 
for war; but by her conduct she gave evidence that 
she intended to back up her ally to secure a diplo- 
matic triumph and the subjugation of her neighbor, 
which would have greatly strengthened Teutonic influ- 
ence in the Balkans. She risked the peace of Europe 
in a campaign after prestige." With such moderation 
it is hard to quarrel. But most pro-Ally Americans 
are not content to maintain that Germany was sixty 
per cent wrong in the diplomacy directly preceding the 
war ; they assert she was ninety-eight per cent wrong, 
or one hundred per cent wrong. According to these 

107 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

uncompromising partisans she plotted a war, conspired 
for it, deliberately provoked it. 

To support the charge of conspiracy the pro-Ally 
fanatics surely cite the well-known facts. They un- 
doubtedly point out that at the end of July, 1914, 
Germany had not recalled her reserves from any part 
of the world, that the Kaiser was yachting in the 
North Sea, that the harvests were not in, that the 
German fleet was scattered in small units on all the 
oceans. To demonstrate that the Entente Allies were 
innocently ignorant of the impending crash they prob- 
ably call attention to the mobilization measures taken 
in Russia as early as June, to the timely review of 
the English fleet in the early summer, to the trans- 
portation of colonial troops to France several weeks 
before the ultimatums. They unquestionably go fur- 
ther. They show that England was unprepared for 
the conflict because she had been maintaining the two- 
power naval standard; France because she practised 
conscription and had recently passed the Three Year 
Law: Russia because the number of her armies and 
reserves was equal to those of Germany and Austria 
combined. Germany, they say, has been pursuing 
for a long time a selfish imperialistic policy; she has 
been seeking colonies and trying to guarantee markets 
for her export products. But the Allies on the other 
hand have pursued a relatively altruistic policy; they 
have stood for the status quo; they guard the rights 
of small nations. This disinterestedness of the Allies 
is demonstrated by their acquiring, previous to war, 

108 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

several times as much territory as Germany; by their 
treatment of Morocco, Finland and Persia; by their 
penetrations of Arabia and China. All of these argu- 
ments lead up to the conclusion that Germany is the 
one militaristic nation, and that her ambitions plunged 
a guileless world in strife. Exactly what we started 
out to prove ! 

But after all the warm partisan of the Allies does 
not reason about causes, — he feels. His emotions are 
dominant. Having determined that Germany is to 
blame for the war, he judges every subsequent issue 
unfairly. Atrocity tales from the Entente side stir 
his anger, whereas atrocity tales from the German 
side, even when better bolstered by proof, fail to move 
his imagination. He would demand that the United 
States protest the violation of Belgium's neutrality; 
but he would consider it silly to protest the violation of 
Greece's neutrality. It should be apparent to every 
thinking man that the Belgian affair must of necessity 
seem more reprehensible to the pro-Ally sympathizer 
than to the sympathizer with the Teutonic Powers. 
The latter cannot help but feel that Germany's extreme 
peril justified the passage of troops across neutral 
territory, and that Belgium, by her secret agreements 
with France and England, by her French sympathies, 
and by the fact and character of her resistance, con- 
stituted herself virtually one of the Allies. Whether 
this view is right or wrong, the fact remains that had 
the United States protested the invasion of Belgium 
she would not have been acting merely in the interests 

109 



GERMANY MISJUDGED 

of international law ; she would have been "sitting in 
judgment" on the war, she would have been taking 
sides. In any event it is not the business of the United 
States, where American rights are not invaded, to 
play the part of international Pharisee and send out 
protests every time any one does anything we deem 
"lawless" or "unrighteous." If we adopted that policy 
we should be shooting out protests every week. What 
tribunal appointed us the judge of nations and their 
acts? 

This is a time pre-eminently for charity, forbearance, 
friendliness to all. It is not a time for imputing bad 
motives, for recriminations. The war is the logical 
result of imperialism, of rival military alliances, of 
the doctrine of the balance of power. The dominant 
cliques of Europe thought a war inevitable. It has for 
decades been the business of these cliques to plot, 
not for war, not for peace, but for successful war. 
Possibly both sides thought the hour had struck in 
1914, the Germans for strategic reasons, the Entente 
for political reasons. Unquestionably the statesmen 
of the Entente believed at the beginning they would 
soon crush Germany and Austria, that the 300,000,000 
would soon overwhelm the 130,000,000. Their coali- 
tion once set in motion, they predicted a short victo- 
rious war. In this they simply misjudged, they under- 
estimated Germany's strength and resources. I can- 
not believe there was much sinister calculation for the 
precise event on either side, except possibly by the 
autocracy and military caste of Russia. On the whole, 

110 



THE ATTITUDE OF AMERICA 

Europe simply tumbled into war. The nations had 
erected rivalries and enmities which could not stand 
the strain of a real crisis. 

If America wishes to accomplish aught for peace 
within the next year, the next decade or next quarter 
century, it must face the real situation. It must grap- 
ple, intellectually, with an evil system, with an inter- 
national problem. Surely Europe is not training itself 
to solve the problem. So far as causes are concerned, 
this war was not a people's war. But today it has 
become precisely that. Hate has eaten into the vitals 
of every nation. To each people the wickedness of 
their foe seems the one great curse upon mankind. 
Blood-lust and revenge are re-enforced by moral pur- 
poses. The spirit of the Inquisition is being revived. 
It hardly seemed possible ; but one can see the re-crea- 
tion of that hell of human motives in England and 
France — the idea of saving the soul by torturing the 
body, — of redeeming a nation by killing its citizens. 
Possibly Europe will recover from that insanity. Cer- 
tainly America cannot help Europe by capitulating to 
the same madness. Only by the exercise of dispassion- 
ate judgment and an infinite compassion can we offer 
the world a new horizon and a hope. 



Ill 



INDEX 



Algeciras, Conference at, 49, 51, 

52. 
Alsace-Lorraine, 73, 74, 77. 
America, and international peace, 

8, 87-96, 105, 111. 
American hostility to Germany, 

reasons for, 18-20, 106-109. 
American injustice to Germany, 37, 

38, 83-85, 105, 106. 
American Rights Committee, quot- 
ed, 101-103. 
American trade in munitions of 

war, 41, 83-86. 
Angell, Norman, quoted, 83. 
Anglo-German rivalry, folly of, 44, 

57, 64. 
Anglomaniacs, American, 96-104. 
Anti-German cabal in England, S3, 
Antwerp, 32, 48. 
Arnold, Matthew, 93. 
Astonishment of Americans at the 

war, 21. 
Atrocities, alleged German, 33-36, 

92. 
Atrocities, Russian, 34. 

Balkans, 23, 25, 55, 67, 77, 93, 107. 
Belgium, invasion of, 27-33, 45-49, 

109. 
Bennett, Arnold, 56. 



Bismark, 61, lA. 

British "blockade," 84, 85. 

British misunderstanding of Ger- 
many, 57-60, 92, 93. 

British White Book, quoted, 46. 

Bryan, W. J., 91. 

Bryce, Viscount, 33. 

Causes of the war, 24, 25, 53, 61, 
62, 90, 105, 107, 110. 

Censorships, contrasted, 59. 

Chesterton, G. K., quoted, 88. 

Civilization, German, 59, 92, 93. 

Clutton-Brock, A., quoted, 16. 

Colonies, German lack of, 63, 78. 

Colored troops, used by Allies, 35, 
36. 

Congo, 52, 76, 11. 

Cramb, Professor, quoted, 61. 

"Defensive", France on the, 55, 

68-71. 
Delaisi, Francis, 91. 
"Democracy", in Germany, 40, 82. 
Dernberg, 19. 
Dickinson, G. Lowes, quoted, 8, 

23, 55, 67. 
Dum-dum bullets, 35. 

England, misjudgment of Germany, 
57-60, 92, 93; relations with Bel- 
gium, 45-49; relations with 



INDEX 



France, 49-55; relations with 
Russia, 55-57; attitude toward 
America, 87-89, 84. 

Entente Cordiale, 50, 54, 76. 

Essen, 31. 

Finland, 23, 57, 77. 

France, spirit of, 66, 78, 79; "at- 
tacked", 27, 68-75; entente with 
England, 49, SO, 54; alliance 
with Russia, 67, 72; colonial 
party in, 54, 76. 

French Yellow Book, 106, quoted, 

69. 
Franco-Prussian War, 1870, 73. 
Franco-Russian Alliance, 55, 67-73. 

German- Americans, 19, 80-86. 
German civilization, 59, 92, 93. 
German preparedness, 24, 38, 39, 

108. 
German victory, possible results of, 

40, 93, 94. 
German White Paper, quoted, 26. 
Gore, Senator, quoted, 99. 
Great Britain, see England. 
Grey, Sir Edward, 29, 45, 46, 50, 

52, S3, 77. 

Hague Conventions, 35, 41. 
"Huns", Germans as, 33, 36, 57, 
89, 92. 

Injustice, American to Germany, 
37, 38, 83-85, 105, 106. 

International Law, violations of, 
35, 84, 98. 

Ireland, 49. 
Italy, 77. 



Kipling, Rudyard, 87. 
Kropotkin, Prince, 56. 

Le Martin, 52. 

Le Temps, 52. 

Loans to Russian Bureaucracy, 54, 

73, 77. 
Lusitania, 19, 98. 

Maxim, Sir Hiram, quoted, 89. 
Militarism, in France, 76-78. 
Militarism' in Germany, 8, 37, 60, 

62. 
Monroe Doctrine, 94. 
Morel, E. D., quoted, 51, 52. 
Morocco, 50-52, 64. 
Munitions of War, American trade 

in, 41, 83-86. 

Napoleon, 71. 

Naval Power, British, 63. 

Neutrality, of America, 83-85, 95, 

96-101. 
NTeutrality of Belgium, 27-33, 45-49, 

109. 
Non-combatant mind, degradation 

of, 13, 35, 111. 
Peace, America's interest in, 8, 

87-96, 105, 111. 
People's war, not a, 75, 90. 
Preparedness, American, 94. 
Preparedness, of Allies, 39, 108. 
Preparedness, of Germany, 24, 38, 

39, 108. 
Pro-Ally partisans in the United 
States, 96-104, 106-108. 

Recruiting campaign, 14, 29, 34. 
Revanche, 54, 74. 



INDEX 



Russia, true nature of, 23, 24, 

5S-S7, 72, 72. 
Russian Orange Book, quoted, 68. 

Saturday Review (British), 61. 
Sazonof, 68. 

Scott, Sir Walter, quoted, 71. 
Secret diplomacy, 29, 45, SO, 53. 
Servia, relation to Austria, 26. 
Shaw, G. Bernard, quoted, 28, 83, 

91. 
Spain, 50. 
Stowell, Professor Ellery C, 

quoted, 107. 
Submarine controversy, 98-100. 

Three Year Law, in France, 76, 
108. 



Tolstoy, 23, 56. 
Treitschke, 37, 61, 107. 

Usher, Roland G., quoted, 30. 

Viviani, 55, 68, 69. 

Von Schoen, Ambassador, 69. 

War, causes of the, 24, 25, S3, 61, 

62, 90, 105, 107, 110. 
Wells, H. G., quoted, 88. 
Westphalia, 31. 

Wilson, President, 82, 86, 95, 96. 
Wister, Owen, quoted, 38. 
Wolseley, General Garnet, quoted, 

89. 

Zangwill, Israel, quoted, 94. 



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